Analytics & BI Tools · Chapter 8 of 8
Making analytics actually get used
The failure that no tool prevents: dashboards nobody opens, and numbers nobody trusts.
Most BI programmes do not fail on tooling. They fail because the output is not trusted, not found, or not actionable — and each of those has a specific remedy.
Not trusted
Trust breaks the first time two reports disagree in a meeting, and it does not recover on its own. The remedies: one definition in a modelled layer; a visible certification marker so users can tell an owned dashboard from someone's experiment; a named owner on every certified asset; and freshness shown on the dashboard itself, because a stale number presented confidently is worse than no number.
Not found
In most organisations there are thousands of reports and no way to tell which is current. The remedies are unglamorous: a catalogue with search that people actually use, aggressive archiving of anything unopened for six months, and a naming convention. Archiving is the one that gets resisted and the one that helps most.
Not actionable
A dashboard that shows what happened without indicating what to do gets opened twice. The remedies: design around a decision rather than around available data; include a comparison so a number has meaning; and alert on exceptions rather than expecting people to check.
The metrics that tell you whether it is working
Report: proportion of certified assets with a named owner, weekly active consumers rather than total accounts, and the number of reports archived. That last one is the health indicator nobody tracks — a BI estate that never removes anything is accumulating distrust.
Do not report: number of dashboards created. It rewards exactly the behaviour that produced the mess.