Elevating BI with Design Thinking: A New Paradigm

Elevating Business Intelligence with Design Thinking: A New Paradigm

Traditional Business Intelligence (BI), the time-honored cornerstone of data-informed strategy, is often critiqued for its complexity and underutilization. The consistent development of dashboards that fail to meet user needs is not only getting old – it’s getting expensive. Data consumers (often marketers and strategists) are reverting back to repetitive data pull requests from data owners, eating up time, resources, and everyone’s patience. 

One proven approach to save your org from this “Dashboard Deprecation Disaster” (I coined this myself) is by implementing Design Thinking into your BI development process. By reimagining how BI tools are developed and focusing on accessibility, usability, and meaningful insights, Design Thinking is breathing life into underused tools and catalyzing the rollout of new solutions that deeply engage stakeholders.

Demystifying Design Thinking

Before diving deeper, let’s clarify what Design Thinking is and its growing importance in BI. Originally rooted in fields like industrial design and architecture, Design Thinking has evolved into a problem-solving methodology that emphasizes Empathy, Ideation, and Experimentation. These core principles are now applied across various sectors to create solutions that resonate with users’ needs.

Core Principles in Action

It can get a bit confusing trying to blend a high-level ideology such as Design Thinking with a field grounded in data and technology. Let’s break down how we’ve made the core principles of Design Thinking —Empathy, Ideation, and Experimentation—a bit more concretely by defining real-life actionable strategies.

Empathy: Understanding the User

• User-Centric Research: The first step in applying empathy in BI is to conduct thorough user research. This involves engaging with the end-users of BI tools to understand their daily workflows, challenges, and goals. Techniques such as user interviews and ethnographic research (where applicable) can provide invaluable insights.
• Empathy Mapping: With the information gathered, empathy maps are created to visualize the users’ desires, pain points, and experiences. These maps help BI developers to step into the users’ shoes and view the BI solutions from their perspective.

Ideation: Generating User-Centered Solutions

• Diverse Brainstorming Sessions: The key to brainstorming is to create a space where participants can step out of their comfort zone. This is critical to coming up with innovative ideas. Go for quantity, embrace the wild ideas, and build on each other’s concepts.
• Solution Refinement: There are always org-specific constraints such as data structure, developer skill set, BI tool out-of-the-box capabilities, etc. Identify these constraints to figure out what is actually going to work in the near-term.

Experimentation: Prototyping and Testing BI Solutions

• Rapid Prototyping: Showing quick mockups to stakeholders early and often using tools like Figma, UXPin, or Balsamiq is a great way to get rapid feedback for refinement. Using dummy data in your BI tool of choice can make these prototypes interactive. Therefore showcasing capabilities that may not be understood through an image-based prototyping tool.
• User Testing and Feedback Loops: A term used in the lean startup methodology is applicable here: “Fail Fast”.  We want our bad ideas to fail quickly, so the final product delivers maximum business value. Cut your losses early by learning through rapid and consistent stakeholder  feedback.

Capitalizing on these principles unlocks capabilities that are not only technically robust but also intuitive, and engaging.  Most importantly, they are aligned with the actual needs and contexts of their users.

Capabilities Made Possible through Design Thinking

The thoughtful implementation of Design Thinking can really get the ball rolling on building a true data-oriented culture. Doing so can open the door to a world of leading-edge capabilities that many of our clients see as foundational requirements:

• Data Storytelling Integration: “Why is this product different?” “What effect does this marketplace shift have on this product?” Crafting narratives around data and using powerful questions can transform dry figures into meaningful insights that drive action.
• Behavioral Analytics to Inform Design: Even something like the number of views on a dashboard can inform the smart restructuring of a business report. Understanding your dashboard’s usage via user data is a nascent, yet expanding capability.

• Interactive Data Exploration: When in doubt, make it interactive. Every graph, every KPI, and package up relevant filters within an interactive navigation section. Empower users to investigate and discover insights on their own, fostering a deeper understanding of the data.

There are several other capabilities to throw in here like AI assistants (Duet AI, Einstein Co-Pilot), AI-powered search (ThoughtSpot Sage), and predictive analytics (Einstein Discovery, Azure Machine Learning). In an ideal world, our entire BI suite is chock-full of leading-edge capabilities, yet moving the organizational needle to this stage of maturity is no easy feat.

Creative Ways to Get Started

So you have a good grasp on what the future state of BI looks like and the necessary steps to get there. At this point, getting org alignment should be pretty straightforward. I mean who’d want to stand in the way of something so exciting and transformative? But alas, facilitating change always takes a bit more ingenuity and elbow grease than one might think. We’ve encountered these roadblocks and found some creative strategies to move mountains with the force of a gentle nudge:

• Legacy-to-Innovation Pilot Projects: Identify specific legacy processes or tools that are ripe for improvement and initiate pilot projects using Design Thinking principles. Showcase tangible improvements in efficiency, user satisfaction, or decision-making quality. These can serve as compelling case studies to advocate for broader organizational change.

• Implement Agile Design Sprints: Schedule dedicated design sprints within the agile development cycle, where each sprint is focused on a specific aspect of Design Thinking, such as empathy mapping or prototype testing. This structured yet flexible approach accelerates the iteration of BI solutions in a familiar framework.
• Innovation Ambassadors Program: Create a network of Innovation Ambassadors from various departments who are trained in, or might have a knack for, Design Thinking and can advocate for its principles within their teams. These ambassadors can provide peer support, share best practices, and help facilitate Design Thinking workshops. Ultimately, acting as catalysts for cultural change.

These subset of creative solutions can spark the change necessary to ride the new wave of Business intelligence into the future.

Our Perspective on Partnership

We understand that the future is laden with AI-enhanced BI systems that not only predict but also recommend strategies. We’re also aware that hastily investing in these shiny new capabilities can quickly eat up your budget, with no ROI to show for it.

At Transparent Partners, we co-create the foundation for long-term Business Intelligence proficiency, rather than just building you one complex tool. We want to build what’s right for you and what’s going to give you an edge over your competitors. If you’re ready to shift towards a data-oriented culture and transform your data into a strategic asset, let’s connect!

References:

Waterton, Tom. “Failing Fast, Using Feedback Loops, and the Benefits of Iterative Design.” Medium, IBM Design, 11 July 2018, medium.com/design-ibm/failing-fast-using-feedback-loops-and-the-benefits-of-iterative-design-e0b86d037f50. 

Gray, Dave. “Updated Empathy Map Canvas.” Medium, Medium, 4 Sept. 2023, medium.com/@davegray/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a. 

“Brainstorming.” IDEO U, www.ideou.com/pages/brainstorming. 

“Best Practices for Telling Great Stories.” Tableau, help.tableau.com/current/pro/desktop/en-us/story_best_practices.htm.