Defeating Dashboard Drudgery

The Current State of Data Insights:

Through the rise of business intelligence maturity, self-service platforms and tools coupled with big data centralization, organizations can understand more about the ways in which they operate, and how their customers and stakeholders interact.

Some have taken this further, using powerful cloud computing, real-time analytics insights and integrated machine learning methods, these companies are able to delve deeper into their data and leverage the power of forecasting to make faster, more informed decisions.

Insights Challenges:

Despite this, many organizations we speak to are still playing catch-up – whilst they may have deployed and have widespread adoption of visualization technologies, they are struggling to turn this into actionable outcomes. Reliant on business users with the right tools, experience and use cases to explore in their data, uncovering the insights becomes a search like finding a needle in a haystack.

This makes insight a ‘pull’ rather than a ‘push’ activity, finding data through which corrective outcome can be taken is difficult enough, the conditioning of this into manageable, trackable and deployable actions is almost impossible for many.

Turning Insights into Action

Recently, I watched a TEDx talk from 2018 by Data Scientist Frank Evans. In his talk, he highlights that visualizations allow for exploration of data, easily prompting questions and testing correlations and theories.

This investigative process typically follows a similar path every time, opening these dashboards, slicing and dicing data through the application of relevant categorical and variable filters, viewing only relevant segments or areas of the business, as well as applying specific date and time filters to view data over a specific period.

In doing so, they are presented with a series of charts, showing lines, bars, pies which highlight a variance, or a change in state, from which may invoke a series of questions as per a typical insights flow:

The challenge here, is twofold:

1. There needs to be data-savvy organizational culture, with skills to ‘pull’ the insights from the data.
2. It implies a process through which something can be done to rectify business problems highlighted through the insights.

The challenge that many businesses still face, is in capture of these insights, triaging them through a human-led review process to turn promote the provided information into a live project, or to reject.
What if, instead, we could deliver the outcomes from the insight triggers directly into agentic actions?

What Comes Next?

‘You don’t drive a car by the dashboard, but with your eyes out of the windshield’ – Frank Evans

Prompted by the unavoidable surge in AI functionality and popularity, AI-driven analytics and decision automation are becoming some of the biggest focus areas of investment for companies. We are seeing AI-powered visualizations, automated insights, and NLP-based queries for embedded analytics, as well as auto machine learning, anomaly detection and LLM-driven scenario modelling capabilities.

The true value in business insights is what you do with the information uncovered. By incorporating alerting rules based on trigger thresholds and generative AI models, trained on business context such as KPIs and core organizational priorities, next best actions with tasks and project management facilitate a move from reactive insights to proactive action.

Whilst by no means a ‘magic box’ solution – with Agentic AI, these insights are transformed into actionable recommendations, which the AI can directly implement or suggest to human decision-makers. Additionally, by employing feedback loops, agentic AI models can be optimized to ensure more accurate predictions and more efficient operations. Combined with a user interface and project management capability to review insight actions and triage tasks for next steps, we can ensure that our insights turn to action and ultimately closes the open loop on using our valuable data to improve business outcomes.

No more trawling through our dashboards to uncover insights that get left unactioned!