Dashboards Don’t Provide Answers—They Reveal the Questions You Should Be Asking

Joe stated, "You shouldn't develop metrics and dashboards hoping to find the answer. Dashboards won't give you the answer—they give you the question."

Rethinking Your BI Approach

Dashboards and metrics are indeed powerful tools, but their real value lies in their ability to highlight deviations, anomalies, and trends—not in providing immediate solutions. Businesses frequently misunderstand this nuance, mistaking the "signal" from a dashboard as the answer itself. This misunderstanding often leads to costly distractions, missed opportunities, and misguided strategies.

Understanding Joe's Insight

Joe Burkel emphasizes that the strength of BI dashboards isn't in providing final answers but in pinpointing precisely where deeper exploration is necessary. Dashboards excel at identifying metrics that have deviated from predetermined norms or targets—these deviations become valuable starting points for strategic investigation.

When a KPI moves outside its expected range, that's your dashboard's way of asking, "Why is this happening?" rather than telling you exactly what's wrong. The subsequent investigative work, driven by experienced managers and domain experts, ultimately leads to actionable insights and effective solutions.

How to Extract Real Value from Your Dashboards

Here’s how businesses can get the most from their BI investments:

Clearly Define Your Metrics and Their Importance: Begin by identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) that truly matter to your organization. Every metric should directly align with strategic objectives, not just convenient or easily measurable data points.
Establish Targets, Thresholds, and Limits: Each KPI should have clear targets, acceptable ranges (conformance), and explicit outer limits. These defined boundaries make anomalies readily apparent, enabling quick identification of when something is genuinely "off." The boundaries need to be based on what and why you're measuring. Too often, percentages are used that don't mean anything, which isn't helpful. Know what you're measuring, why you're measuring it, and why the thresholds are essential. This is key to getting to your answer when metrics trend off-target.
Recognize the Trigger for Investigation: Train your team to interpret deviations in dashboards not as answers, but as triggers for deeper questions. Ask, "What changed recently?", "What underlying processes might be involved?", or "Who might know more about this issue?"
Follow the Breadcrumbs: Use the anomaly revealed by your dashboard as a starting point for detailed exploration, root cause analysis, and collaborative problem-solving.
Continuous Refinement: Regularly evaluate your dashboard and metrics to ensure they continue to provide relevant and actionable insights, prompting the right questions at the right time. The pandemic was a huge shakeup across multiple industries, and it was shocking how many companies failed to evaluate the relevance of their metrics and dashboards. Business as usual won't work if the world around you has changed.

Embracing the Right Mindset

Realizing the true purpose of dashboards—raising insightful questions rather than providing definitive answers—is transformative. It positions BI as a dynamic tool that actively supports strategic thinking, problem-solving, and innovation, rather than passively handing out oversimplified solutions. Rarely are the answers simple and sometimes, you need to change the metric to measure what is happening in the real world. Look at your metrics from all angles, questioning, "Do I have the right metric and thresholds?"

Dashboards as Your Strategic Compass

Dashboards, metrics, and BI are not omniscient tools capable of delivering instant solutions. Instead, they serve as strategic compasses, guiding businesses towards the most important questions they need to ask. Joe Burkel’s insight underscores a crucial point: pursuing dashboards to find immediate answers is chasing a rainbow you'll never catch.

Instead, embrace dashboards for what they truly offer—a powerful mechanism to reveal the questions that will drive deeper understanding, smarter decision-making, and more effective strategic outcomes.