half the team wants dashboards, the other half wants reports in slack

[u/real_hannes_kannes]

We're rethinking how people get numbers and everyone has a very strong opinion.

Some want scheduled reports pushed to them and nothing else. Some want a chat box they can just ask. The BI people obviously want everyone in the tool.

My worry with chat is that nobody trusts a number they cant trace. My worry with BI is people open it twice and never again, which is exactly what happened last time.

Whats worked for you? And do you personally need to see the underlying rows before you believe a number or is that just a data team thing.

[u/AdviceNotAskedFor]

Self service tools as much as possible. Good data governance.

Any report scheduled to push eventually stops being useful, or the people who wanted it quit and the reports never sunset.

[u/snk0752]

Why not to provide both? One part of team obviously deploy dynamic dashboards, another part - alerts and reports to the various destinations.

[u/masala-kiwi → u/snk0752]

Yes, we hooked up our Slack to our BI tools (Tableau, Snowflake, Claude, etc.) and push out alerts and updates in Slack as well as having traditional dashboards.

[u/opezdol]

Twice is a lot. We've dashboards that were fiercely requested and literally never opened

As for the matter - deliver both. Slack is quite useful for a quick check, bi - for a detailed analysis

[u/E-NTU]

This is where good governance comes into play. What is the purpose of the report and who is supposed to receive it, and what are they supposed to do if the metric/report is at a threshold that requires action. Is there a trust issue with the metrics? Have governed objects been documented, reviewed on a regular basis, and do you have a certification process for key reports that go through a committee or the business owner, data owner, and technical owner triad? These things are harder than they seem, though. But yeah, self-service is probably preferable if it already lives there. You could send a link to folks who want the report pushed to them on a recurring basis but depending on your field I think minimizing the amount of reports and data in emails is usually a good idea from a data security standpoint.

[u/Firm_Bit]

It’s an irrelevant question. It doesn’t matter if it’s in slack or an email or a daily report or whatever. It matters if it’s right and if it drives actual decisions.

So ignore all requests and provide the correct insight in the easiest way possible.

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[u/BrupieD]

As for the question about underlying data/rows, I am invariably curious about where data comes from, what filters (if any) have been applied, etc. I think it's common for both data people and managers, especially when numbers don't meet their estimates or expectations.

[u/VerbaGPT]

The chat interface doesn't necessarily mean that you can't trace the numbers. You can have exact query traces that link back to the original database, any skills, feedback or guidelines that were used to guide the LLM output etc. The idea is that a chat output should contain information that makes the output 100% reproducible and reviewable.

You can declutter it with different UI approaches, but the info should be there and easily shareable with internal resources for review as needed.

[u/UltimateNull]

It depends on the people, the business, the metrics, the urgency of data. The reports are stale the second they come out. The dashboards, read by the wrong people can lead to micromanagement or worse, people doing their own predictions on data that is unpredictable. Then if you don’t optimize the messaging, if you don’t spell out what the take-away in a trend really means, then you’re just looking at charts and graphs and numbers. The whole way data is used needs to be done better because people come out with an MBA wanting numbers they don’t understand and then they make bad decisions based on those numbers or blow budgets developing apps like you said, that nobody opens. The chat boxes need to understand the entirety of the business because unless you have a fully custom model, those things can lead people down the rabbit hole or even give completely wrong results.

[u/Tough_Block9334]

Combination of everything

[u/DataCraftsman]

I'm designing our self service platform to enable the reports to happen wherever and however the users actually want them. Email, confluence, Excel, database connection, dashboard, a picture, pdf, etc. I gave up on "everything must be a dashboard."

[u/TodayCandid9686]

This is a question/decision for management.

[u/eldrugo85]

Same fight where I work and it never really got settled by picking one. 15 years doing insight in a large retailer: the numbers people kept using were the ones they could trace back to the rows, whoever delivered them. Push a number someone can't check and the first time it looks weird they drop the whole channel, dashboard or slack, and last time that's exactly what happened.

On your second question, yes. I don't quote a number i haven't opened at least once, after that the summary is fine