Analytics to Action

In today’s data-driven business world, understanding the hierarchy of data products is crucial. Misusing these products—especially dashboards—often leads to inefficiencies. This misuse is common among SaaS vendors who build excellent software to streamline business operations but fall short in providing proper analytics. Their dashboards are often misapplied by businesses for daily monitoring, missing the key data product that truly drives action: reports.

Let’s explore the hierarchy of data products that your data team should follow:

1. Reports: Clear, Actionable, and Static

A report is designed to give clear, static insights. Its purpose is to tell the truth behind the business’s performance, providing key performance indicators (KPIs) that highlight whether things are going well or need attention. The critical thing to remember about reports is that they are not meant for user interaction. They should be static—used in formats such as PDFs, printouts, or PowerPoint slides. A report is not designed for slicing and filtering data; rather, it’s meant to present one truth about the business for that time period.

Additionally, reports should be generated regularly—whether daily, weekly, or monthly—depending on the business’s needs. The key is that reports offer trend analysis over a time frame that allows users to see the impact of any operational or workflow changes. For example, if a user implements a change to improve customer satisfaction, the upcoming reports should show how that change affects the trend in the near term. If the report looks too far back (e.g., a rolling quarterly average), the changes won’t be reflected in a timely manner, making the report less useful for driving action.

Reports are about telling the business story simply and clearly. They should trigger a call to action, prompting the user to investigate deeper if a KPI is trending negatively—or positively—to uncover the root causes of those trends. Importantly, this deeper investigation leads to the next tool in the hierarchy: dashboards.

2. Dashboards: Interactive Tools for Root Cause Analysis

Unlike reports, dashboards are designed for user interaction. They allow for filtering, drilling down, and manipulating data to uncover the why behind a given KPI. A dashboard should provide flexibility, enabling users to explore the relationships between different data points and sources.

For example, if a report shows a dip in sales, the dashboard lets users filter by region, product, or time period to pinpoint where the issue is. Dashboards should be dynamic, with filters and slicers that empower users to investigate, draw insights, and ultimately decide how to take action. The role of a dashboard is to answer the question, “Why is this KPI behaving this way?”

3. Spreadsheets/Applications: Powering Business Operations

At the base of the hierarchy are the spreadsheets or operational applications that power day-to-day business functions. These tools often store the raw data that feeds into both reports and dashboards, though they are not typically used directly for insight generation.

Misuse of Data Products by SaaS Vendors

Many SaaS vendors offer applications that improve operational efficiency but treat analytics as an afterthought. They often provide their clients with dashboards but neglect to offer well-structured reports. This leaves the client responsible for generating their own reports, either internally or through external consulting.

Here’s where SaaS vendors often fall short: even their own data teams need reports. Without customized reports, data teams may miss important trends or issues, relying solely on dashboards to spot problems manually. This is not an ideal approach for uncovering trends or answering the question, “What do I need to focus on this week or month?”

The Role of Bookmarks in Dashboards

In recent years, dashboards have introduced a feature called bookmarks. Bookmarks allow users to save certain views, apply filters, or set realative date-time slicers to create a pseudo-report from a dashboard. This feature has a useful application—but only in very specific scenarios.

Here’s an important caveat: Bookmarks should not replace proper reports. If your data team expects users to create custom reports through dashboard bookmarks, why not just build the report in the first place? The bookmark feature is often a band-aid solution that requires users to be data-savvy. Most end users of data products are not inclined to use bookmarks to generate the insights they need. So, while bookmarks are useful, they are not a replacement for the static nature of a well-designed report.

However, bookmarks do have a place. For example, let’s say you’ve uncovered an operational issue using the dashboard, such as a bug in a SaaS vendor’s application. The bug requires users to take manual action within the application to resolve it. You could use a dashboard bookmark to save the view that shows the metrics and filters related to that issue. Over the next few days or weeks, you would check the report to see if the bug fix has improved the KPI. Simultaneously, you’d use the bookmark to make sure the operational changes are being sustained.

Once you’re confident the issue is resolved, the bookmark becomes unnecessary, and you return to relying solely on the report until the next issue arises. This is how bookmarks should be used: as a temporary monitoring tool for short-term issues uncovered by root cause analysis, not as a replacement for static reports.

Why Does This Hierarchy Matter?

When businesses misuse dashboards for routine monitoring or expect reports to facilitate deep-dive analysis, they lose efficiency and clarity. Each data product has a specific role:

• Reports present the current state of the business, triggering action.
• Dashboards allow for interactive analysis to uncover root causes.
• Spreadsheets and applications capture the raw data that powers reports and dashboards.

By properly aligning each data product to its purpose, businesses can streamline decision-making processes, avoid inefficiencies, and empower their teams to focus on what truly matters.

In summary, SaaS vendors and businesses alike should ensure that reports are used for what they’re intended—static, presentation-ready overviews of the business—and dashboards are leveraged as interactive tools for deeper analysis. This hierarchy helps create clarity, avoid data product misuse, and prevent data products from ending up in the graveyard of unused analytics tools.