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A few years ago, I had encouraged a BI Director to create a BI dashboard showing the key financial metrics of their company and to show it to the CEO.
The day after he showed it, he called me to say that he was never doing that again. Apparently, the CEO was not impressed and told him that he didn’t want to see colors and pretty interactive charts, he just wanted a spreadsheet!
Needless to say, the CEO had an accounting background and was a finance guy used to numbers and spreadsheets.
It’s not that finance people don’t want or need BI dashboards, it’s that their needs are different to say someone in sales, marketing, operations or HR. Finance people love looking at numbers but they also like applying formulas to those numbers to see differentials and calculate forecasts and understand the financial pulse of the business.
A BI dashboard is quite capable of doing that, but you don’t necessarily need lots of colors and charts. Instead, you would show key numbers more prominently, show exceptions in red (yes that is a color) and build in time series and “what if?” sliders to turn a static spreadsheet into a powerful , time-saving and useful financial tool. In addition, you build in the capability to take any data set you view through the dashboard to export to Excel (a must for all financial folks!).
Designing a BI dashboard based on both the needs and benefit of the business users who will use it is critical to its success and adoption. Therefore, the target users must be involved and invested in the way the dashboard should look and behave.
I have seen many beautiful looking dashboards that rarely get used and some very ugly dashboards that get used a lot. However, most people’s definition of beautiful and ugly varies widely.
Here is the best way to go about creating a BI dashboard from my experience:
- Create a prototype of the dashboard together with the target users to make sure you capture all their requirements and job flows they want to use it for. This should be an iterative process going back and forth with the business users.
- Once you have it functionally complete, then involve a graphic designer to make is more compelling and easier to use
- Iterate again with the business users to make sure they like the new look and feel
Now, not everybody has access to a graphic designer but trust me this is an important step and you can easily contract with one or a BI consulting company that has them on staff.
Not many BI dashboard developers are great dashboard designers, and you really need both to create the best BI dashboards.
Some of you may remember the BI visualization product Roambi created by the developers of the even more successful BI visualization tool Xcelsius. When Roambi was wowing people everywhere with its slick mobile visuals, the CEO, Santiago Becerra, would proudly state that he had more graphics designers on staff than software developers and that was no accident.
Over the last few years, I have seen many great BI dashboards entered for the InfoSol Annual dashboard awards at IBIS and I am looking forward to seeing more at IBIS 2025. There are three award categories:
- Best Business Dashboard
- Limitless Business Intelligence Dashboard
- Most Valuable Dashboard
While not all the winners have used a graphic designer for their dashboards, it very often makes a difference in terms of the overall user adoption and success of the dashboard.
Be sure to check out the Dashboard Award submission details and get some recognition for your Bi dashboard creation.
