4 Ways to Improve the Adoption of Dashboards within your Organization
More and more companies are making it a priority to embrace analytics, which typically starts with moving away from performing analysis in spreadsheets to using interactive dashboards. Luckily, BI tools on the market today make it very easy for organizations connect to a wide-array of data sources and quickly build insightful dashboards. However, even with the most insightful dashboards, it can be a struggle for organizations to get their users to give up what they’re used to and start using dashboards instead.
Each organization is different and needs to find the right plan for adoption that best fits with its culture, but there are four ways that all organizations can focus on to improve the adoption of a new BI tool and analytics:
- Gather dashboard requirements early in process
- Train the users of the dashboards
- Create simple and easy-to-use dashboards
- Embed dashboards in existing tools
1. Gather Dashboard Requirements Early in Process
Often developers just jump into building new dashboards without communicating with the actual end-users to see what they need first. This approach tends to result in dashboards that never get used due to there being a big difference between what the developer thinks the end-users need vs. what the end users actually need.
Recommendation: To avoid building dashboards that users don’t actually need, the first thing a developer should do is set up working sessions with those end users to capture all the requirements needed. The types of requirements that should be considered are:
- The objective or purpose of the dashboard
- The audience of the dashboard
- The calculations that need to be created within the dashboard
- The data needed for the dashboard
- Any special requirements for the dashboard
2. Train the users of the dashboards
Training programs can have the biggest impact on the adoption of a new BI tool because people won’t use the tool if they don’t know how to. The challenge with most training programs is that they focus mostly on training the developers and forget that the users of dashboards need to be trained as well. Although newer BI tools help developers to create easy-to-use dashboards, there can still be a learning curve that training can help accelerate.
Recommendation: To ensure your users know how to use the new BI tool and interact with dashboards, provide a training for the end-users that focuses on making sure they know how to use the tool and navigate through the data and dashboard to find valuable insights. For optimal success, the training should be mostly hands-on with real dashboards from the organizations, so users get to practice with real scenarios that they are familiar with.
3. Create simple and easy-to-use dashboards
Newer BI tools make it very easy to add filters, drill-downs, KPIs, charts, etc. to dashboards and gives the power to the end-users to find their own insights in the data. All of these features can be really helpful if used sparingly; however, filling your dashboards with lots of charts and navigation can actually distract your end-users and prevent them from getting any value out of the dashboards.
Recommendation: To avoid overwhelming your users, start by creating simple reports with very little navigation and only a few charts on each page with a focus on bringing the most valuable insights to the front and center. Once users start to get more comfortable with the new tool, you can start to add in some more complex navigation to your reports.
4. Embed dashboards in existing tools
Organizations tend to have an abundance of internal apps and websites that employees need to use daily to do their jobs. This can end up creating tool fatigue and make it very difficult to get employees to to embrace another app or website. This is bad news for introducing BI tools, as they often do require employees to access dashboards via a new app or website.
Recommendation: To ensure your users are constantly checking their dashboards, find an app or website that your users are already going to and embed the dashboards there. This avoids the need for your users to introduce a new place to go in their routine. Some common places you can think about embedding dashboards are: a Sharepoint site, Salesforce, email, Slack, etc.
