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> “This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.” Ha-ha… haaa Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up

> “This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.” Ha-ha… haaa Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily. This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team, and all but one developer literally never even looking at any of: APM, deployment pipeline, log analytics system, issue tracker, or dashboard.

semi-extrinsic 3y ago
IDK, but a possible counterargument to some of your observation is that you could have a team where every day/week they have a meeting to look at the dashboards, and it's always Sam who opens the dashboard and shares on the big monitor/group call.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Replace Sam with me, the person that built the thing. My experience aligns with the the author of the original blog article. It's impossible for someone near the bottom of a hierarchy to convince anyone of anything, unless the building is literally on fire and you're the external fire safety consultant. I'm the proverbial fire safety consultant. I come in, upgrade the suppression systems, hold multiple hour-long training sessions on how to check the figurative "water levels"... and nobody does. If I turn up a year later, it's guaranteed that the system is empty and rusting, and the monitoring panels have cobwebs on them. I've actually noticed that you can have an emergency situation (a "raging fire"), and then sure, people will listen to you about that particular problem, but if you ask them to pour a glass of water onto something that is "just smouldering" they'll laugh in your face for wasting their time. "Come back later if it's really on fire."
chris_wot 3y ago
I work at a school, and hop boy do the students damage their laptops a lot. When we hit the point where we refused to loan out laptops for stupid shit like the kid punched the laptop screen, we found that the year coordinators actually needed a very simple daily report with the name of the student and how long the laptop has been in for repair. That’s it. And you know what? It was useful. You can make as many fancy dashboards as you like. But if the data is truly useful operationally, it will likely be a boring list with no graphics.
- ludicity 3y ago
  This is so true. The only dashboard I'm confident was useful eventually became a web app in-house to support the organization's core function.
spydum 3y ago
i think tech folks like us often fail on this front of "change management". We can build/buy/integrate amazing tools that can actually solve (or prevent) problems, but we suck at changing organization behavior to adopt them and extract the value. Then we all look around like: why are we still operating in hard mode? because we havent made the case for change, and convinced folks to implement it. changing human behavior is tough

semi-extrinsic 3y ago

IDK, but a possible counterargument to some of your observation is that you could have a team where every day/week they have a meeting to look at the dashboards, and it's always Sam who opens the dashboard and shares on the big monitor/group call.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Replace Sam with me, the person that built the thing. My experience aligns with the the author of the original blog article. It's impossible for someone near the bottom of a hierarchy to convince anyone of anything, unless the building is literally on fire and you're the external fire safety consultant. I'm the proverbial fire safety consultant. I come in, upgrade the suppression systems, hold multiple hour-long training sessions on how to check the figurative "water levels"... and nobody does. If I turn up a year later, it's guaranteed that the system is empty and rusting, and the monitoring panels have cobwebs on them. I've actually noticed that you can have an emergency situation (a "raging fire"), and then sure, people will listen to you about that particular problem, but if you ask them to pour a glass of water onto something that is "just smouldering" they'll laugh in your face for wasting their time. "Come back later if it's really on fire."

chris_wot 3y ago

I work at a school, and hop boy do the students damage their laptops a lot. When we hit the point where we refused to loan out laptops for stupid shit like the kid punched the laptop screen, we found that the year coordinators actually needed a very simple daily report with the name of the student and how long the laptop has been in for repair. That’s it. And you know what? It was useful. You can make as many fancy dashboards as you like. But if the data is truly useful operationally, it will likely be a boring list with no graphics.

ludicity 3y ago
This is so true. The only dashboard I'm confident was useful eventually became a web app in-house to support the organization's core function.

spydum 3y ago

i think tech folks like us often fail on this front of "change management". We can build/buy/integrate amazing tools that can actually solve (or prevent) problems, but we suck at changing organization behavior to adopt them and extract the value. Then we all look around like: why are we still operating in hard mode? because we havent made the case for change, and convinced folks to implement it. changing human behavior is tough