Most dashboards fail for a simple reason: they start with charts instead of questions.

Organizations often assume that better visualization tools will solve their analytics problems. Usually the issue appears earlier than that. If the underlying question is unclear, the dashboard just displays confusion more cleanly.

The useful starting point is simpler and harder at the same time: what decision is this supposed to support? If that answer is fuzzy, the dashboard probably will be too.

Strong analytics environments focus less on making charts and more on building shared understanding of the data and the decisions it is meant to support.