Data Consumption - Dashboards, Queries, Oh My

The Problem

Many analytics teams today are plagued with the too many dashboard problem - they build them, and no one uses them.

Dashboards are often artisanal works; carefully prepared, aggregated for performance, with multiple rounds of feedback to satsify a stakeholder.

To make them work for more than one stakeholder, they need a growing list of filters and customization, which slowly undermines the performance and value for the initial reason until the cycle starts over.

And that's if they even get used - sometimes a dashboard is requested, and the business has moved on by the time it's arrived.

What's better?

Dashboards should be cheap and disposable. Queries too. This means they need to be able to be built incredibly fast and customized.

But how do you avoid multiple versions of the truth with many dashboards? That's a classic reason for many dashboards - for this project, this metric, let's have a single source of truth.

The Trilogy Proposal

You can have your cake and eat it too. Dashboards can be throwaway - but your semantic layer needs to live forever.

A Trilogy data consumption ecosystem should be a layer -

• At the top, dashboards and queries - they move fast, burn bright, die young.
• Below - team/project specific model files. They contain shared calculations, are updated/versioned.
• Bottom - core data source files. These might change the slowest, and contain core metrics, and may be owned by a central team.

This works because we can solve for performance at the dashboard layer by dynamic aggregate construction when needed.

Ready to try it?

Grab one of our community data models and see how fast you can build a dashboard today in Trilogy Studio.