Most people have access to too many reports or the ‘so-called’ all in one dashboard. But when it's time to make decisions, it’s clear that the dashboard is not designed to move further into the data, to unlock deeper insights and do this easily.

Today we want to talk about 2 personas working with data.

First The Leader , there are a few questions you need answered:

1. How are we performing as a business, business unit or team?
2. What else should I know about?

Typical dashboards solve for #1, but when you are curious about a particular area and want to ask further questions, things fall apart.

So what do you do? Depending on your role and clout in your organization you either wait in the queue for the data team or alternatively, you can lean on your internal team. Who then have to scramble to get the data, export to excel from an existing BI system and build a report in the hopes it might fill the need.

More times than not, with either scenario you have more questions, and the team scrambles again!

Either approach relies exclusively on others, and is very costly from both a time and resources perspective. It takes large budgets to discover insights and lots of patience to WAIT!

Now let’s talk about The Builder

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As a builder, there are quite a few things you work on

1. Ensuring data is collected, transformed and loaded in a format that is available for reporting.

2. Ensuring the data is clean.

3. Learning and getting trained in the new BI tool that was bought by the organization.

4. Gathering requirements and executing on every single dashboard and report request, that “needs” to be built.