Dashboards vs. Data

TRI: As head of Revenue Assurance for a large telecom organization, most people would expect you'd have an elegant dashboard display on your desk to show you the status of what's going on. . . .

Romano: Sorry I don't fit the stereotype. Actually I have no dashboards. To me, it's far more important to get the data right.

Getting good data, getting accurate output, and making sure we measure against the right set of metrics -- those are the most important things. A pretty dashboard is the last thing on my mind.

I've seen projects where they create a dashboard upfront, but to me, the data tells you the story. Call me a bottoms up person, I guess -- I need to see the detailed data first.

Of course, visuals are very important to support a story you want to tell, but the danger is that dashboards sometimes cause you to come to the wrong conclusion.

For instance, creating dashboard from multiple pieces of customer data with no connection back to the individual customer can get you in trouble.