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How one guy deleted 97% of his company's dashboards (and why that's actually genius)

Original: Getting Rid of Dashboard Sprawl

May 28, 2025
6 min read
Case Study
Intermediate
Getting Rid of Dashboard Sprawl

Summary

Struggling with dashboard overload? This blog post offers a solution to the problem of "dashboard sprawl" - the proliferation of dashboards that can overwhelm data teams. By introducing techniques for consolidating and streamlining your dashboard ecosystem, you can enhance data visibility, improve decision-making, and free up valuable time for deeper analytics work. Data professionals seeking to optimize their reporting infrastructure and enhance the impact of their analytics will find this insight particularly compelling.

Who This Is For

Analytics Engineers
Data Engineers
Business Analysts

Key Takeaways

  • Learn why dashboard sprawl happens - managers need intuitive decision-making but get fragmented views instead
  • Implement dashboard trees: hierarchical, bounded structures that cascade from high-level metrics to detailed breakdowns
  • Focus on defining key organizational metrics as the foundational primitive before building any dashboards
  • Use the cascading approach to build rich mental models that reduce endless requests for more charts and filters
  • Apply the 'bounded' principle to prevent dashboard proliferation while maintaining necessary detail levels

Tools & Technologies

Business Intelligence platforms Dashboard creation tools Data visualization software

Topics Covered

data-warehousing data-infrastructure data-management

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Modular Dimensional Data Modeling offers a revolutionary approach to data engineering, empowering analytics professionals to build scalable, maintainable data models. By leveraging modular design principles and dimensional modeling techniques, this methodology enables streamlined data transformation, effortless integration of new data sources, and enhanced data accessibility for business intelligence and advanced analytics. For data-driven organizations seeking to unlock the full potential of their data, Modular Dimensional Data Modeling provides a strategic edge in navigating the complexities of modern data ecosystems.

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Topics

data-warehousing data-infrastructure data-management