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The Challenge of Flexibility and Scalability for Large Enterprises

PUBLISHED ON 7 JANUARY, 2015

Working with multiple dashboards and defining key metrics and data visualizations from scratch every single time may become tiresome and resource-consuming, especially for large enterprises who manage vast amount of data on a daily basis.

At Sweetspot we consider data governance to be the top priority, which is why we are constantly working on finding the right balance between flexibility and scalability. This means that performance dashboards should be highly customisable and tailored to each stakeholder’s needs, and at the same time easily replicated and distributed across departments, countries or brands. Both flexibility and scalability are fundamental and indispensable to every data-informed organisation, who should not be forced to prioritise between the two.

Let’s consider some use cases to further investigate how to appropriately address the challenge of flexibility and scalability:

1. Imagine a big retailer, such as Walmart, Tesco or Carrefour, who operates worldwide and offers a number of different brands. The dashboards used by such a retailer will be broken down by segments, such as country or brand, and the metrics probably won’t differ too much across those. Defining a set panel template will provide the company with a holistic portrayal of the performance across different areas or departments, without demanding the monotonous or time-consuming task of configuring many similar KPIs, charts or tables.
2. Another example is a digital agency with a number of different clients to manage. Instead of defining separate dashboards for each one of them, this agency may wish to replicate KPIs and charts to then fill those with client-specific data. The unique character of each client would still be preserved thanks to the extreme flexibility of the templates created, as along with being able to change the instance of data between clients, you can also configure different variables such as profiles or segments within the same template.

Marrying flexibility and scalability is undoubtedly an entangled and delicate task, but its successful completion will only lead to higher personalisation and better reflection of business performance.

We would love to hear from you: how does your organisation address the challenge of flexibility and scalability?