I love autumn. One of the best things about this time year is going to an apple orchard and picking out blue ribbon apples to go along with home-made donuts. It’s time to savor the fruit of summer’s hard work. For those of us in business, maybe the best way to say it is that Fall is nature’s return on investment. Unfortunately, in the cycles and seasons of the modern enterprise, a lot of money and effort has been put into sowing the seeds of data-driven operations, but on the back end of all that investment, there just isn’t that much fruit on the vine. They’re putting scare resources to maintaining and nurturing data collection, management and analysis systems and the outcome is a very far cry from a Thanksgiving feast. But why?

There are plenty of contributing factors to a scanty harvest, but the most significant is this: the absence of shared understanding. See, the whole point of a business intelligence system is to make an entire business more intelligent. Instead, a select few individuals work some wizardry to extract a semblance of sense out of all their data as it streams by. But that new-found understanding rarely affects the rest of the organization. Until the wisdom of business leadership can be combined with all the knowledge from data-driven operations, there won’t be enough food on the table to make it feel like all the hard work was really worth it. To learn more about the things that are monkey wrenching your information harvests, check out our whitepaper on the seven deadly sins of dashboard design.