Glossary · Business Analytics
Dashboards-to-Decisions Gap
also: decision systems · automated analytics
Definition
The dashboards-to-decisions gap is the structural failure of analytics investment: teams produce more dashboards but decisions don't get better or faster. Closing the gap requires moving from descriptive reports to decision systems, pre-specified trigger thresholds, automated action routing, and outcome logging for calibration.
A dashboard answers what happened. A decision system answers what should we do and when. The gap exists because most analytics organizations produce the former while the business needs the latter. Closing it requires pre-specifying decision thresholds (alert when metric X crosses value Y), routing alerts to owners with explicit SLAs, and logging the resulting decisions for calibration. Retrofit on top of existing dashboards is feasible; done well, it raises decision velocity 3-5 times.
Essays on this concept
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