Avinash Kaushik (aka, My Analytics Hero) has a great post today on The “Action Dashboard” (An Alternative To Crappy Dashboards). In his typically tangible, engaging way, Avinash has mounted one of my all-time favorite soapboxes — it is a grand misconception to see “using data” as primarily an exercise of capturing data and then making that data accessible. We have a lot of internal debates on this — on a broad scale when it comes to what the “right” dashboard is for managing our own operations, as well as what the best way is to provide actionable data to our clients. From Day One, we’ve captured data phenomenally well. And, that’s a great thing — GIGO applies when it comes to the data, in that no amount of analysis is going to provide actionable insights if the data is dirty or wildly incomplete.

We’ve also cleared the “make the data accessible directly to our clients” hurdle — not without some stumbling, but the data is available, and it’s available in a self-service manner.

What we’ve found, though, is that that really is not enough. When it comes to actually analyzing campaigns and events that we run for our clients, we have to really roll up our sleeves and start interpreting the data and making observations and recommendations…in plain ol’ text! Otherwise, we’re providing pretty data, but not necessarily actionable information. Avinash has a great analogy in his post:

You are walking down the street. You look at someone from behind and you think “hmmm she’s / he’s pretty”. So you speed up and overtake them and in the process you sneak a glance at them (yes you are married but looking is still ok :), and you are hugely disappointed. Not pretty.

His point is that a dashboard that looks fancy/pretty/cool on a cursory inspection…all too often does not truly provide useful information at the end of the day. It’s a real challenge in the Business Intelligence industry — BI (and web analytics) tool vendors roll out fancy/pretty/cool features in an effort to differentiate themselves from their competition, and because they want to make sure they have a sizzling product demo. But, all too often, those features do not really add value when put into use.

We’ve been quietly shifting our processes internally in light of this reality. We have rolled out a new framework for delivering post-campaign analysis to our clients that allows for more of the “other 3 quadrants” described in Avinash’s post. We’re shifting around the resources who tackle different aspects of that report so that the people closest to the context of the campaign can spend their energy interpreting the data. It’s not perfect. But it’s heading in the right direction.

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