The difference between ‘another dashboard’ and a useful one

A recent Route Fifty article argued that cities should stop building dashboards. As a company that provides dashboards for local governments, you might expect us to push back hard.

Instead, we wanted to echo some of the challenges raised by the author, and offer some solutions.

The truth is, Komal Goel’s piece identifies real problems echoed in urban data and public administration scholarship that we recognize in the work we do with local governments every day. Cities large and small come to Envisio already overwhelmed — or underwhelmed — with tools, with staff toggling between systems, wary of yet another technology implementation process. 

We see a pattern where people come to us with data collected, but not always used. Or where previous dashboard efforts were built, shared and presented, but ended up sitting at a distance from the decisions they're meant to inform.

The question worth asking isn't whether that happens. It clearly does. The thing is, we also see a lot of highly successful local government dashboards — ones that inform, engage and support meaningful decisions. 

So what are these organizations and dashboards doing differently? The question is whether the dashboard is the cause of the disconnect or whether it's just where underlying problems become visible. We’d argue it’s the latter.

When Dashboards Fail, They Tend to Fail the Same Way

Goel rightly identifies issues that show up across many local governments: unwieldy goals, disconnected tools, metrics that aren’t clearly driving decisions, and inconsistently used and poorly understood data.

There’s also a deeper tension at play. When reporting is imposed from the top down, it often fails to match the realities of day-to-day work. Teams are asked to track things that don’t quite map to what they’re doing, resulting in data that is technically complete, but not all that helpful, functionally speaking. 

Beyond that, Goel brings up an urgent point: not everything that matters can be reduced to a number. Context, tradeoffs and lived experience don't disappear just because a dashboard exists. We agree with these points, especially in an era in which trust in government is at an all-time low.

There's real research behind dashboard skepticism. In a 2021 study published in New Media & Society, researcher Jathan Sadowski embedded with an Australian city government's strategic planning team for two years, tracing their attempt to build two data dashboards from conception through implementation. 

Both ended up unfinished and unused. Departments said they had data ready to share and couldn't deliver it. A previous dashboard had already died quietly when a CEO who used it in management meetings was replaced by one who didn't.

So yes, dashboard projects can be expensive, challenging and ineffective. But they don’t have to be.

The Real Problems: Poor Data Culture and Dashboards Without Workflows

A lot of local government dashboards are built at the end of a process. They sit on top of fragmented systems, pulling in data from multiple sources that weren’t designed to work together. So by the time information reaches the dashboard, it’s already been distorted by gaps, delays and inconsistencies.

At that point, the dashboard becomes a viewing layer rather than a management tool. And performative data culture helps no one. Poorly done dashboards can look comprehensive while still being incomplete, appear current while relying on inconsistent manual updates and suggest alignment without actually supporting it.

So what’s the solution?

Not fewer dashboards, but better conditions for the data and cultures feeding them.

The New Media & Society study is worth looking at again, because the two dashboards Sadowski documented failed for different reasons. The corporate dashboard degraded when that CEO left and the new CEO didn't use it. Staff stopped updating it, technical pieces broke and went unrepaired. 

Naturally, the new leader never launched it at all, and the whole project stalled when yet another incoming executive had no interest in it. The city dashboard, meant for public communication, ran into a different problem: departments actually had data ready to share, and when asked to provide it, they couldn't. Why? The data was siloed, inconsistent or simply didn't exist in a usable form. What eventually got built looked good but couldn't update reliably.

Two dashboards, two distinct failure modes. One died because it was dependent on a single leader's management style rather than being embedded in organizational practice. The other never got off the ground because the data infrastructure wasn't ready.

Neither failure was really about the dashboard.

Bottom-up tracking, which Goel rightly advocates for, is part of the answer. The people closest to the work should have real input into what gets measured and how.

But that input has to connect upward and into a coherent picture of organizational priorities, otherwise you end up with a collection of departmental data that tells many stories but doesn't add up to one. The translation between street-level work and citywide strategy is exactly where implementation tends to break down.

What a Useful Dashboard Actually Requires

The New York City example cited in the Route Fifty piece is instructive, but I’d argue, not quite for the reason the article suggests. NYC's capital projects dashboard tracked only 47% of project IDs and left out major departments entirely. Again, that's not a dashboard problem. That's a data governance problem.

A city making decisions about $73.9 billion in capital projects needs visibility into those projects. The failure was in the system feeding the dashboard, not the dashboard itself.

Useful public sector dashboards share a few characteristics that bad ones lack.

They're connected to the operational structure underneath them. When a department head opens a dashboard, they should see their team's work represented accurately, because the system behind it has clear ownership, defined reporting cadences and metrics developed with input from the people doing the work. When those conditions exist, updating a dashboard feels like a natural part of the job rather than another layer of administrative burden.

The metrics also mean something to the people reading them. The goal is alignment: strategic priorities translated into operational measures. What a department does day-to-day gets connected to what the organization is trying to achieve over the next several years. When that translation works, a dashboard becomes a shared reference point.

And critically, the data gets used. Dashboards that aren't referenced in leadership meetings, that don't shape budget conversations, and that don't connect to reporting cycles get ignored quickly. Staff stop updating them simply because nothing happens when they do.

The Kind of Dashboard Culture Worth Building

The organizations that get the most out of their public-facing dashboards tend to share a particular quality: the dashboard is a byproduct of how they operate internally, either already or aspirationally, not a product only built for external consumption.

Their departments and employees have clear ownership over certain actions and measures. Reporting happens on a defined cadence because it's tied to real management cycles. Leaders reference the data in conversations that actually shape decisions. Dashboards are actively promoted to the public so they feed a sense of internal accountability and continuous improvement. When all of that is in place, publishing progress publicly becomes straightforward because the internal discipline already exists.

For local governments doing this well, a public dashboard isn't just a communications product. It's a reflection of how the organization operates internally. If the internal reporting is disciplined and the data is trusted, publishing it publicly becomes straightforward. If the internal culture is inconsistent, the dashboard will always feel like a problem to manage rather than a tool to use.

That's the distinction worth focusing on. Not whether to have a dashboard, but whether the organization has done the work that makes a dashboard worth having.

Mary King is a senior content writer at Envisio.