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Geckoboard: Extracting knowledge from data

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26th Oct 2015
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Over the past couple of years data dashboards have been mooted as the future of management reporting. With the launch of yet another contender into this busy market, Geckoboard founder Paul Joyce discusses his data dashboard product and how it can improve the communication of business measurements.

Geckoboard is a web-based reporting tool that allows companies to pull metrics from a large variety of sources and communicate it across the organisation via monitors around the office or using smartphone and tablet apps.

The London-based company was founded in 2010 when Joyce, who was building data warehouses for investment banks at the time, spotted that there was a “gap between business intelligence tools costing hundreds of thousands of pounds and Excel spreadsheets”.

“At the time,” Joyce explained, “I felt that too much data – be it sales targets, performance or expenses data – was locked away in spreadsheets. We wanted to put that information in the hands of people who could use it.”

While the gap Joyce mentioned has since been filled by numerous data dashboard offerings, Joyce thinks there is still confusion around the role dashboards play within organisations: “There’s huge interest in data dashboards, but ask a dozen people what a dashboard is and what it’s for, and you’ll get a dozen different answers.

“Regardless of its purpose, every tool that comes out now has a dashboard loaded into it, but that data is disparate”, said Joyce. Instead of making life simpler for those controlling the data, dashboards are adding to information complexity and overload.

Information display

Joyce argued that a dashboard should “communicate something quickly, at a glance. More isn’t always more when it comes to dashboard displays . You need to be able to understand the screen from 19 yards.”

This mindset has fed into the design of Geckoboard, which keeps presentational extras to a minimum. Joyce explained: “As a species we’ve evolved to make sense of the world around us. At Geckoboard we’ve tried to understand how the human brain processes information. Our dashboard doesn’t overuse colours, animation, 3D etc because they are cognitive barriers.”

When questioned on the effectiveness of having performance targets, sales figures or expenses ticking along above employees, Joyce rejects the notion that such information might increase employee stress or dissatisfaction.

“A strange thing happens when you put important information in a place where everyone can see it,” said Joyce. “Having this information displayed helps people to know and understand what’s important to the organisation and what’s expected of them.

“We’re all adults. If you treat people like adults and give them the resources then they take more responsibility for their work and ultimately produce better results.

“Where Geckoboard has been installed and we’ve seen it working well it’s helped because people know what’s expected of them.

“It also helps to spot anomalies in real time rather than squirrel things away on a spreadsheet until the end of the quarter. You can spot problems before they become catastrophes, and you can also spot opportunities before it’s too late.”

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