Gartner predicted back in June in its analytics trends forecast that usage of analytics dashboards are set to decline in favour of automated data stories, but TrueCue has opposed this, stating that organisations will use an discovery-based dashboard to embark on data maturity and digital transformation journeys.
The recent report from Gartner highlights that the most relevant insights emerging as a result of data stories will be streamed to individual users based on context, role or use. However, according to TrueCue, this practice won’t deliver results deep or robust enough to make critical decisions off of.
“It is fantastic to see the business world maturing its AI and data science techniques to leverage augmented analytics and Natural Language Processing,” said Tim Archer, analytics director at TrueCue. “However, it is not ready to make the leap towards a decline of the dashboard in the time-frame Gartner has stated.
“In some contexts, it may be useful to see customised datasets and metrics sent directly to the most relevant person based on their specific role or function, however this would not be robust enough to justify what Gartner is referring to as a ‘demise of discovery-based analytics dashboards’.”
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Archer went on to explain the importance of collective analytics usage across the organisation, as opposed to individual usage, in order to gain truly trustworthy insights about the state of the company.
“Data-driven, analytically mature organisations are well informed and understand their business through descriptive and visual analytics,” he said. “Having point-and-click discovery dashboards that can visualise complex data will continue to play a vital role in building a baseline understanding of the business’s data quality and this can be used to provide new users with training on the basics of analytics.
“As Gartner notes, there will be a gradual transition towards augmented insights that are contextually relevant, but we are some way off seeing ‘the decline of the dashboard’. In fact, we actually expect to see continued global growth in the usage of advanced analytics dashboards by businesses until total analytics ubiquity is achieved.
“Data and analytics maturity is an ongoing journey, and trust isn’t gained in a short period. Whilst we may see the trend moving towards personalised, dynamic insights, we also believe that many organisations have not yet started their analytics maturity journey yet, so they will not be ready to receive automated data stories in place of standard intelligence dashboards anytime soon.”
