Lucas Brennan
— Director, Technology & Analytics Infrastructure
February 28, 2024
8 min read
The average enterprise BI environment now contains 4,700 dashboards. The average number of dashboards that directly inform a documented business decision: fewer than twelve.
$14B
spent annually
on enterprise BI tools in North America alone
71%
of dashboards
are viewed fewer than 10 times after creation
0.3%
of BI metrics
can be linked to a documented business decision in most enterprises
The gap between insight and action is not a technology problem. Organizations have invested heavily in data infrastructure, and most now have access to richer, faster data than at any point in history. The gap is a design problem — specifically, a failure to design analytics for the decision context rather than the data context.
Most dashboards answer the question no one is asking. The question being asked is: what should I do differently tomorrow?
Lucas Brennan
Director, Technology & Analytics Infrastructure, FischerJordan
1
Metric proliferation — too many metrics dilute attention; decision-makers cannot identify which signals are actionable
2
Retrospective framing — most dashboards show what happened, not what is likely to happen or what should be done
3
Ownership vacuum — no single person is accountable for acting on a given metric
4
Insight latency — data arrives too late to influence the decision it was designed to support
5
Translation failure — analytical outputs require expert interpretation; operators lack the context to act
The alternative to dashboard-first design is decision-first design. Start not with the data you have but with the decisions your organization makes on a regular basis. Map each recurring decision to a decision owner, a decision frequency, and the minimum information required to make a better decision. Then, and only then, design the analytics layer.
The Decision Inventory
Begin with a Decision Inventory: a structured catalogue of the 20–40 most consequential recurring decisions in your business, organized by frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) and by current information quality (excellent, adequate, poor, blind). This inventory becomes the product backlog for your analytics roadmap.
The FJ Analytics-to-Action framework has been applied across 31 enterprise transformation engagements. For a Decision Inventory template and facilitation guide, contact FischerJordan.
Lucas Brennan
Director, Technology & Analytics Infrastructure
Published
February 28, 2024
Reading time
8 min read
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