Try as we might to build the perfect marketing dashboard, it’s far too often that marketing and business users don’t find the value in IT generated reports. This often leads to inaccurate reporting and misinformation due to data dumps and Excel silos in an attempt for the business to perform analytics autonomously. In the current landscape, that can be the difference between coming out of the other side of the pandemic successful or not.
So how do we break the business out of Excel and get them to buy into governed enterprise reporting? Dashboards developed alongside the business have an exponentially higher success rate of adoption than those solely created by IT. Below are five steps for successfully handing off an IT generated dashboard by working with the business during the development process.
5 Steps for Successfully Handing Off IT Generated Dashboards to Business Users
- Shadow business users to identify current reporting processes. By understanding a business unit’s current methods for reporting and communicating data, the technical team will be able to replicate those processes within the organization’s governed, sanctioned platform. This will help make IT generated dashboards more consumable for business users.
- Data discovery session to identify metrics & KPI’s. This is your requirements gathering step which will help the technical team to make sense of the data they are pulling into the dashboard. This data discovery session can be as simple as exchanging emails to clarify definitions of business terms, whatever helps to better define key metrics to be included in dashboard charts.
- Develop a sample dashboard. Now that IT has a basic understanding of the data, they can start to build a sample dashboard that provides some basic insights and acts as a springboard to get to the next level of analysis in the final LOB dashboard. Once the sample dashboard is complete, schedule a time to solicit feedback. What is valuable? What isn’t valuable? What is missing? We have seen success in developing mock-ups within the chosen BI tool during the requirements gathering phase, which you can read more about here.
- Working session to develop a functioning dashboard together. Use the feedback provided by the business user to edit the sample dashboard or build a new dashboard that better fits their needs. Preferably IT would build this new dashboard alongside the business user so that they can help drive the analytics, and IT can demonstrate the power & capabilities of the tool.
- Schedule routine check-in sessions. Ultimately, user adoption comes down to two things: value and ease-of-use. Routine working sessions will help to teach business users how to better utilize IT provided dashboards and make updates so that they remain relevant and insightful. This type of ongoing support will help drive long-term adoption of IT generated dashboards and the use of the IT-sanctioned tool.
Now more than ever, planning will need to be iterative, and changes will likely need to be made along the way. And that’s okay. It may seem daunting, but it will certainly play a large role in the longevity of your company.
Our ADAPT team experts are leveraging an agile methodology to continuously listen, learn, and adapt to the marketplace to provide recommendations based on topics that are working for customers leveraging data analytics to stabilize their operations.
