Best Practices for Promoting Dashboard Adoption

One of the pitfalls for successful implementation of BI Analytics in companies is adoption. A company may invest in all the modern technology and create attractive-looking analytics, but still struggle with long-term adoption of analytics.

Many Sisense clients have successfully tackled this problem. Below are some creative ideas that might help you drive analytics implementation in your company at the different stages of your journey toward a data-driven culture.

Think Ahead at Rollout

When introducing analytics into the organization, you have probably appointed a BI champion or set up an Analytics team. Their job is to gather requirements from all stakeholders, design the BI solution and, finally, execute the design.

An additional, parallel, objective of this team should be to build a User Adoption Plan. Start thinking about the rollout of the dashboard right from the first phases of the workflow. Making these decisions in the initial planning phases helps ensure that your dashboards serve the ultimate goal of achieving maximum Bl value in your organization.

The best User Adoption Plans are built alongside the dashboards and adjusted as your BI project expands, to ensure full adoption and utilization of BI resources by all of your stakeholders and target audiences.

Provide Ongoing User Training

So your BI person or team has created a brand new set of dashboards to serve your organization. If the rollout of the analytics was successful, pretty soon your BI champion(s) will have their hands full with user requests to create more dashboards and tweak the widgets to answer additional business questions. This can hinder or even derail further development of your analytics solution. This is not how it should work. Modern BI solutions are all about self-service, allowing all users to use them to get insights.

That said, there is still a learning curve. How steep the curve is depends on your BI tool and the users' technical level, especially if the bulk of your team is not tech-savvy. You will have to train users to use the tool and think analytically.

Below are some suggestions for user training:

  • Use the training courses offered by your BI vendor.Sisense provides a rich offering of courses that cover all stages of the BI flow and cater to all types of uses, from newbies to advanced:
    • Business Requirements Gathering Framework
    • Business Requirements Recon: The Questions
    • Meet Si-Cling (Case Study Introduction) Session
    • Know the Data Session
    • Identifying Relationships Session
    • Dashboard Planning Document

  • Conduct quarterly workshops to train your users - and not just the newcomers. It is best to include an objective-oriented component in the workshop, which means that users should come with a business question they struggle with. By the end of the workshop, they will have created a dashboard that explores their actual business questions. They will also will have learned a lot about the system and built their confidence with an experience of success.

  • Offer weekly office hours for one-on-one training and support of your users.

  • Provide resources online - dashboard documentation, Q&A on the most frequently asked questions, etc. You can provide this as part of your internal user portal, web site, etc.

When all the users across the organization are inspired analytics users, do you still need a dedicated BI resource? Of course. Business users are not familiar with your data and data sources. They do not know much about data cleansing, ETL processes, many-to-many joins, etc. It is good practice to leave the data governance to professionals, and allow business users to take it from there. And when all these training efforts are in place, they are guaranteed to save hundreds of hours for your BI resources.

Learn how one of Sisense clients does this in this webinar: Increasing Adoption of BI Within Your Organization .

Promote Across all Levels of the Organization

When your BI team rolls out a new dashboard, how can you promote it across the organization and make sure that users are aware and integrating it into their ongoing, long-term work processes? Obviously, the number of paths to take depends only on the creativity of those involved. Below are a few ideas that were implemented successfully with Sisense clients:

  • Promote dashboards through internal email announcements. In Sisense, that's easy to do by sharing the new dashboard with all or just some users across your organization in one action. For details, see here.

  • Prepare training on each new dashboard. This can be a short video or one-pager that you upload to your internal BI portal. State clearly who the audience is for this dashboard, and how the audience will benefit from using it. Communicate clearly all the changes you make to existing dashboards. It is crucial that users understand the outcome of each change. Otherwise, when they come to the dashboard and do not see what they saw last week and what they expect to see today, their notion of the dashboard as a single source of truth might be undermined.

  • Engage users with dashboard contests. This solution is as simple as it is brilliant. Dashboard contests can encourage users across the organization to make practical use of business intelligence, becoming well-versed in using the system in the process. It can also help you identify the specific datasets that most people in the organization need to use. To learn how this benefited a Sisense client, see Sharing Dashboards.

  • Create an end-user steering committee (COE). For most organizations, one of the main stumbling blocks to BI adoption is building consensus between the stakeholders. To overcome this problem, be sure to invite the three key groups of organizational stakeholders in relation to analytics: business users, business analysts, and data engineers. To learn more about building organizational consensus for a BI platform, see here.

  • Appoint executive sponsorship to enforce usage. An effective sponsor for a BI-related initiative would be a senior-level executive with a data-driven outlook, whose team will benefit from the introduction of this initiative. This sponsor will have to define the business scope of the initiative, set up business priorities and delineate a business strategy required to adopt analytics in the organization.

Monitor Usage

Once analytics are in use across the organization, it is important to monitor the usage of the different dashboards. This includes tracking the number of users that use each dashboard, the number of users that create their own dashboards, tracing what the users do in dashboards, and so on.

If usage is low, the next step is to gather feedback from your users to understand why this is so. This might happen for various reasons, such as users that see no value in analytics, lack the knowledge to use your analytics tool, aren't clear about the objective of certain dashboards, lack the executive sponsorship to enforce usage, etc. When you know the reasons, you can correct .... and repeat as many times as necessary, until the time comes to retire the dashboard. A handy feedback questionnaire for users is suggested in our BI Implementation Methodology handbook .

Is there an easy way to monitor analytics usage? Yes. in Sisense, usage analytics is a built-in dashboard that enables you to monitor your Sisense activity across all users and business dashboards. With Sisense Usage Analytics, you can better understand how users interact with Sisense and optimize your configuration accordingly. For more information, see Overview of Usage Analytics.

Video Explanation

Watch this video for more information about dashboard desgin best practices: