A Natural Death Of The Dashboard

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Tech News & Articles

5 min readAug 6, 2023

Dashboards have served us well over the last few decades. However all good things must come to an end. Or do they?

Image by Kroshka__Nastya. Licenced under Envato Elements

There’s an ever growing rift developing between dashboard die hards and “data progressives” on the subject of the humble dashboard’s demise. Countless stories have been written with absolute certainty that the dashboard is out in the abyss of legacy tech, somewhere in the midsts of Commodore 64’s, Amiga’s, Mainframes and even abacus’s.

After over 25 years in both the finance and data sectors, and growing up in an era that started with a black & white TV (yes, TVs used to be black and white for real!) and witnessing the evolution of computers into PCs and smart devices that we now use, I have seen the evolution of the dashboard firsthand. Indeed, like countless others, I played my small part in their rise to fame.

I cast my mind back to the late 90’s and early 2000’s. MS Excel had a limit of 65,536 rows. Not a lot by today’s data standards! However, that wasn’t the worst thing holding us back! In the early days, you were a lucky human-being indeed if you had a PC powerful enough to use 1/4 of that row capacity just for the “data sheet”. Let alone the grinding noises, burning smells and the MS blue screens of death (look it up!) from our PC’s when we added a handful of pixelated graphs into the mix!

Working under those conditions lent itself to the idea of the dashboard and it also worked in parallel to corporate’s wish to have a handful of information that told them what they need to know. It was the happy medium between literally printing the “data sheet” verbatim (which used to happen too) and the limited information we could squeeze into a nicely formatted dashboard style front page, without needing fire services to come and extinguish our PC’s!

Are dashboards dead?

In short no! The humble dashboard lives on! There will always be a need for a dashboard style report. If for no other reason than, there’s a phenomenon occur when one moves up the corporate ladder... They naturally don’t have the time to interrogate systems and sometimes they just want to pull up a screen with a simple & nicely formatted handful of stats that they need to know.

Is their usefulness diminishing?

Absolutely! With BI tools such as Tableau and PowerBI coming onto the market over the last decade, their ability to handle larger datasets has been a leap forward in data viz capability and capacity. However, this capacity has also been their own Achilles heel!

With more data and computing power to run interactive visualizations, as well as the ability to build dashboards with choose-your-own-adventure, deep dive navigation, we find ourselves in a situation where dashboards have become cluttered with excessive information and complex to navigate. Navigating through this abundance of data has become as problematic as the days when we used to provide the formatted “data sheet” in Excel.

Today’s technology offerings and advancements in the data ecosystem are rapidly pushing the knife deeper through the heart of our beloved dashboards.

Our needs are changing

Somewhere in the throws of the evolving big data capability, analysts became pigeon holed as “graph producers”. That is not the sole job an analyst and we’re now moving back to the all encompassing role:

Analysts are tasked with finding as much information as they can on a topic and translating it into meaningful intelligible insights.

We crunch a lot more data and we have bigger stories to tell!

To break it down simply. The world has become a complex place for businesses to operate in and that flows onto far greater expectations from our analysts. No longer will a dashboard with a few pretty graphs suffice the ever increasing appetite for more insights and understanding of the complex operating environment. We have evolved beyond the usefulness of a dashboard alone.

What’s Next?

With the adoption of tech such as cloud computing, new lakehouse designs and the use of semantic layers, we’re seeing new ways emerge to address the data appetite. Embedded or Contextual analytics is a term now coined around a lot. To break it down simply, rather than a fixed dashboard at the end of the data lifecyle. We can now embed analytics into core business systems, allowing useful insights and intel to be brought up real time by the end user at the click of a mouse.

To give an example:

Imagine a call centre environement, the end user taking calls is talking to a customer and they think, wouldn’t it be useful to know how many times this customer has called, what’s the typical successful sale rate, What other useful infomration exists that might make my interaction with this customer more useful?
Once upon a time the end user would have to troll through a long log of interactions with this customer to understand their history, often real time while juggling the customer on the other end of the line. With embedded analytics, we can provide a summarised snapshot of the customers history at the click (or hover) of the mouse.

Where does AI fit in?

AI makes the above an even better prospect. With the capabilities that already exist and are emerging, we can take our example above a step further. Imagine if we had a AI model listening to the call and it started feeding real time analysis to the end user on the callers tone of voice, likelihood of a successful sale, key words that triggered negative or positive responses etc. The list is endless and most are already in practice today.

But I’m an analyst and I like my dashboards!

I understand you. I am you. But this is our reality, we were once top of the food chain in our hay day. However, with the progression of the ecosystem we exist in, we have to adopt these new technologies and progress with them or face being put out to pasture.

Most importantly, embrace the new tech and ways to present data, it’s exciting stuff!