Dashboard Trust Transparency

When you publish a dashboard to your stakeholders you are making a commitment to them to provide timely and accurate data. They are trusting you to do your job to the best of your capabilities. You need to ensure that you are worthy of their trust and exhibit complete transparency. If you look at many dashboards you will see elegant views of data and analytics, but that is all worthless unless you prove that the data is both timely and complete, and it needs to be visible on the dashboard - so that the stakeholder has a high degree of confidence.

You can use the following technique with both Power BI and Tableau. It is completely dashboard agnostic.

For a single source dashboard I will add a High Water Mark for that source in the footer of the dashboard and mark that as "As Of Date". The user can know see if the dashboard has been refreshed or if the data is still from a previous day. They can even discuss this or alert on this. It is really a good early warning indicator of a potential problem.

If I have a multi-source database then I still retain a High Water Mark in my footer. But, now it is the Minimum High Water Mark for all my sources. It won't flip until all sources achieve the current date. I also add a popup or second page to show the High Water Mark for each of my sources.

Transparency is the greatest way to build trust. Being transparent also gives you some leeway when problems do occur. You can still maintain the trust.