Insights Over Data: Emphasizing Analysis Over Dashboards

We live in a data-driven world, with analytics teams serving a crucial role in transforming raw data into actionable insights that can drive better decision-making. However, the sheer amount of data companies have to work with has grown exponentially over the last several years, making identifying meaningful observations and trends difficult. As such, we've increasingly relied on dashboards to condense these large datasets into something more easily understandable and observable. 

Though dashboards have benefits, particularly regarding data exposure, they shouldn't be the only way companies engage with their data. Without effective analytical support, it is also easy to cherry-pick the data highlighted by dashboards and come away with a biased perspective. So rather than being confined to static reports and dynamic dashboards, analytics teams should prioritize analysis over dashboard proliferation.

While dashboards have many obvious benefits, they are also very blunt, rarely serving any specific need perfectly. They instead offer data by itself, leaving interpretations to users themselves. This hinders organizations from fully harnessing the potential value of their data. Relying solely on dashboards for decision-making can lead to overlooking critical insights, data interpretation biases, and missed optimization and innovation opportunities. Effective data analysis by skilled professionals is essential to derive actionable insights and make informed strategic choices that can drive the company's success in a data-driven world. These tools provide valuable visualizations and summaries, often failing to truly answer the "why" behind the data. 

Simply put, dashboards present surface-level insights but typically lack the tools needed to extract the greatest potential value from the given data. Not to mention that while dashboards are fairly good at looking at past data, they are also prone to facilitating bias, especially since you rarely get the full context surrounding the data itself. This is why it's important to have data-savvy people onboard to analyze this information rather than assuming that dashboards are trustworthy. By focusing on analysis, teams can uncover hidden patterns, identify trends, and provide stakeholders with a comprehensive understanding of the data.

For instance, one of the key skills for getting the most out of data is data storytelling. As data science expert Brent Dykes has said, companies will often use descriptive headlines or titles from exploratory analyses or dashboards in the data stories, which often end up obfuscating the main takeaway from the data scene. Data analytics goes further, moving past the "what" of the data and providing a better understanding of the "why" behind the data, which leads to "what's next." This does require more effort though effective data management is necessary to easily find, visualize, and tweak data, while analytics teams must proactively analyze the data and identify root causes to make informed predictions.

To help, the Localytics team has developed a number of planning tools designed to help make data analytics more manageable, including Depthfinder and Decoder. Rather than rely on the static data provided by dashboards, stakeholders can get hands-on with data, allowing them to understand the data and identify more meaningful trends more thoroughly. These tools exemplify the Localytics teams credo of "enable better decisions," as stakeholders can apply their own understanding of local marketing intelligence and optimize their channel-mix strategies based on these additional data-lead insights. 

None of this is to say that data dashboards don't have an important role to play, far from it. Companies should have a few, as they make certain aspects of data management much more accessible. However, analytics teams have a unique opportunity to transform data into meaningful insights that dashboards alone cannot provide. By moving beyond static reports and dashboards and prioritizing analysis, teams can drive better outcomes and enable companies to deliver vital information to their stakeholders better.