Duplication of effort leads to:
Wasted hours – Time spent on duplicating dashboards can be spent on more value add work

No single version of truth – If a stakeholder has access to multiple dashboards of a similar theme, which one should he/she refer to ?

Employee dissatisfaction – Employees do not want to do repetitive and mundane tasks and will switch to companies with a better data culture

Increasing costs – Companies might have to pay someone overtime or hire new staff as the current staff is “overworked”

But not all is lost. If you are working in an organisation facing such issues these steps might help:

Specialist Reporting and Analytics team – Treat analytics as an important part of your business. Hire specialists who are not only technically sound but are also adept at stakeholder management. Consultants can also be part of the mix

Common data model – Make sure all your data is in one place from which reports can be generated

Consistent design – Make sure you have corporate standards for your reports

Time spent on developing an automated dashboard / Time spent on developing it manually

Now consider an example of developing an Employee Hours dashboard where you want to track the number of hours spent by employees on various projects

The IT team has made the data available to everyone so the Finance, Projects ,and Consulting divisions start work on developing the dashboard independently as each one of them has a requirement to track employee hours

Now we have 3 dashboards which are 80% alike in terms of content and the KPI’s they produce

So what is the ROI of the Employee Hours dashboard ? The dashboard here is not one particular workbook but the theme “Tracking employee hours on various projects”
so by this definition all three dashboards meet this criterion and are grouped as one

So @120 hours per dashboard the ROI = 360/172 = 2.1 which is a negative ROI

Duplication of work is one of the biggest issues facing companies today when they are deploying a self service BI solution.

Next time you want to develop a dashboard think about it being part of the wider deployment and not as an individual piece of work

Ideally you would want the dashboard that you have developed to increase revenue/decrease costs/reduce risk. But once again it is hard to quantify such metrics from dashboard usage.

Traditionally ROI is defined as

Total Profit/ Total Investment

So if you bought $100 in stocks and sold it for $150, your ROI is 50%. So if you have made a profit you have
positive ROI else you have a negative ROI

IMO the ROI for a dashboard should be defined as

Time spent on developing an automated dashboard / Time spent on developing it manually

If you had a dashboard which took 60 hours to develop in Excel and it requires 2 hrs of manual effort per week the total time spent annually on the dashboard is 60 + 56*2 = 172 hours

However if you develop a new dashboard while automating everything you might say spend 120 hours to develop it

So your ROI = 120/172 which is ~0.7 which is less than 1 and hence its a positive ROI

Before designing a new dashboard evaluate if the ROI is less than 1. These days it should be a resounding YES!