Dangers of Dashboard Reports

I'm not about to go around telling you that businesses don't need dashboard reports. only that they can provide a false sense of security. a dangerously warm-fuzzy feeling of control.

I have often witnessed cases where team members get so used to seeing similar patterns repeated that they stop really looking at reports. oftentimes these reports hold the key to important operational changes, but the data is so dense that the changes pass undetected until reaching crisis proportions. meanwhile management, secure in the knowledge that they have dashboard reports keeping the pulse of the company's operations, continue their future planning based on flawed assumptions.

Some of the pitfalls I have seen

differences between booked sales and fulfilled sales in evaluating effectiveness of marketing campaigns

failure to properly train all stakeholders in the proper interpretation of data. A team member who has not had the meaning of a report, and its contained data explained thoroughly is apt to assume that the data is completely reliable, needs no interpretation, and is all properly attributed. Anyone who has spent time working with online tracking knows this not to be the case.

data tunnelvision allowing the historical content of dashboard reports to limit your marketing team's imagination in fostering and developing new revenue generation or customer acquisition channels.

upper management or accounting team assuming that historical results are scaleable to any size and that the historical performance patterns will hold steady
failure to consider internal labour costs when evaluating online campaign effectiveness in reports

slowing site operation in preference to internal report generation, data processing and synchronization

delaying report generation beyond usefulness

storing aggregated data and failing to foresee future requirements for reporting calculations