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It's Time! Two Strategies to Declutter Your BI Tools and Dashboards

Andrew Lee
Andrew Lee
April 16th, 2024
It's Time! Two Strategies to Declutter Your BI Tools and Dashboards

As the days grow longer and the flowers start to bloom, now is the perfect time to declutter our BI tools and dashboards. By tidying up unused and outdated dashboards, you can create a better experience for your end users.

Over time, BI tools can become cluttered with dashboards that are no longer relevant or useful. This can lead to several problems:

  1. Navigation friction: Wading through a sea of unused dashboards makes it harder for users to find the information they need quickly.

  2. Unnecessary maintenance: Maintaining unused dashboards consumes valuable time and resources that could be better spent on more impactful projects.

  3. Confusion and mistrust: Unused dashboards can contain outdated or inconsistent analysis, leading to confusion and mistrust in the data.

By decluttering your BI tool, you can create a more curated and trustworthy data environment that empowers your organization to make better decisions.

✂️🍃 Two Strategies to Tidy Up Are Pruning and Limiting ✂️🍃

  1. Limit: Determine the number of dashboards you can plausibly maintain at a high bar and work backwards from that constraint. This might just be 10 dashboards with high impact for your stakeholders. Getting down to a small number will require you to work quickly with your stakeholders. A tool migration can be a great time to reset expectations. You can start by lifting and shifting a core set of dashboards with the promise of investing in and improving these over time.

  2. Prune: Use the admin tools at your disposal to analyze which resources aren't getting used or have been broken for a significant amount of time. Simply get rid of them. This approach requires less change management, but doesn't eliminate creep in the future. It can be scary to delete things, but if you're using code based workflows you should be ruthless. You can always recreate things you've deleted.

✂️🍃 Hashboard's Auto-Archive prunes unused resources automatically and safely ✂️🍃

At Hashboard, we understand the challenges of managing a BI solution, which is why we've developed an auto-archive feature to make it easy to keep it clean. With auto-archive, you can automatically trash unused resources based on customizable criteria. You can always restore from trash or used our code-based workflows to check in YAML files for archival purposes.

By leveraging Hashboards's auto-archive feature, your team can increase trust and confidence from your stakeholders. Read more in the docs!