The Rise of Developer Analysts and The Death Knell of Dashboards

Aakash Sharma — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 06:35:02 +0000

The year 2020 was utterly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It indeed was the strangest and most tumultuous year of our lives. By mid-2020, more than half of the employees in companies across the world were working from home full-time. Amidst the turbulence and disruption of regular work schedules, while some managed to shift online, many companies were not well equipped to cope with digital relocation. And for those who did, the demand for remote systems and tools increased.

As part of corporate efforts to empower a fully developed workforce, provide better customer service, update cyber security protocols and much more, almost overnight, companies from all industries accelerated their digitization initiatives. Analytical firms estimate that five years of digital business adoption was squeezed into a period of eight weeks in 2020.

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Dashboard manages data. And data empowers businesses to create new products, make better decisions, and grow their business.

Is Data the New Oil? No: Data is the New Soil

The above quote is by David McCandless. Data empowers businesses to create new products, make better decisions, and grow their business. But to do this, knowledge workers are increasingly learning Structured Query Language (SQL) for data access, preparation and analysis. As a result, we are seeing the rise of developer analysts’ growth in building analytics applications that solve a specific business problem using specific enterprise tools that run on dashboards.

When Did Dashboard Come In?

A dashboard’s primary goal is to provide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for a specific purpose or business process. In another use, “dashboard” is another name for “progress report” or “report” and is considered a form of data visualization.

Dashboard has been in the picture for a long time. They are the default option for analysis, and almost everyone has access to the control panel. Control panel reviewers claim that there will soon be too many dashboard systems in the tech-business environment. This will create a severe reporting problem. They say the answer to the reversal problem of spreading is in eradicating the dashboards.

Dashboard: Pros and Cons

Pros – Dashboards are useful for:

Non-technical users: These are usually busy entrepreneurs who are not patient with technically advanced solutions and just want timely information to make their decisions.

Presentation of the essential top and final indicators of the company

Cons – Dashboards are bad for:

Ad-hoc analysis.

Exploratory data storage, for example, when you want to obscure information about your business.

A Change is Called For

Analysts are bored with creating analytics dashboards that knowledge workers use only once or twice before requesting a different dashboard. This trend leads to the need for analytical applications that knowledge workers can use to visualize and understand complex data independently.

Besides, a lot of information is stored in existing control panels. Data storytelling startups like Sapphire portfolio company Narrative Science use dashboards created in Tableau and Qlik and develop a description of the updated data when the data changes.

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