Ask HN: How to get everyone on the same page (dashboards/data/analytics)?

5 points by jerye ↗ HN
Hi HN,

Has anyone here worked at a company where everyone was on the same page regarding which dashboards/analytics tools to go to when looking for dashboards and/or analytics presentation platforms?

Am part of a growing company and as we grow, we're wanting to resolve the issue of "not having everyone on the same page" when it comes to numbers and metrics. A common scenario we're finding is Sales Analyst doing reporting from Salesforce, Product Analyst building dashboards on Tableau (which pulls in data from the actual product database), and Marketing Analyst building reports in Google Analytics with each of them having a different view of the "business". Note that we already have a business function that tries to ingest and merge all the data from our product database, marketing tools, etc but there is significant delay in processing all these down to a tidy data set.

Among some of the different sources of dashboards and analytics are (non-exhaustive):

* Google Analytics / BigQuery. * Salesforce / Wave Analytics. * Hubspot. * Tableau. * Some other custom built analytics tools.

Is there ultimately anyway to get everyone to agree (a meta dashboard with links to other dashboards or put a stake in the ground and say everyone needs to wait until the data has been processed by the centralised data team) or is this an exercise in futility?

Thanks.

3 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 17.0 ms ] thread
1) are there specific negative business impacts from the way they’re doing it now?

2) what’s the incentive (in the form of clear immediate increased value or saved labor) for them to do it your way?

I’d extend that to ask, why not just make all three “flavors” visible to all stake holders? Are there combinations of the data you want to fuse together ?
It can get worse. The company I work for acquires other companies regularly, so we have every dashboard and analytics imaginable.

Just switching everyone to one billing account per system is a huge savings (I think they had like 20 different Salesforce contracts at one time).

I do guess there's value in having one source of truth though, good luck! :)