INEIGHT CASE STUDY:
OTTAWA RAIL
DASHBOARDS FOR THE PEOPLE
Data dashboards are great. But you can’t build a useful one if you don’t understand it — or don’t want to. “I think the biggest barrier to creating a great dashboard is that people see data as frightening, even overwhelming,” Moustapha says. “There’s this huge table with characters and numbers. Nobody wants to look at it. So, it’s our job to make the data talk.” It’s this “talking” aspect, combined with building trust, that seems to be the key to getting full buy-in from all stakeholders. “We show them that by creating dashboards, by customizing them, the entire project team will experience a level of security in the data feeding into the dashboards that you just can’t get with Excel spreadsheets.”
Because the data that feeds the visuals for the dashboards is provided by the data owners and the experts in the field, there’s also no doubt about the data being true. “It’s accurate and it’s displayed the way it should be, stored the way it should be, in a rolling process straight from them,” Moustapha says. And because of InEight’s integration with Microsoft, his team is also able to export data from Power BI®, dive right in, and look at the raw data to verify that it is accurate.
The ability to centralize everything into one single platform is an additional aspect of the InEight dashboards that everyone on the team really likes. “Basically, if you need the truth, whether you’re an office, cost or field engineer, or commercial manager, as long as your data is stored properly, you’re able to see it at the level you need, when you need it,” Moustapha says.
One unexpected advantage for the team? The dashboards seem to be very good for building in-house expertise — expertise that’s empowering not only for projects, but for lives and careers. Moustapha explains it like this: “You build a dashboard and then you show it to everybody. And they see that it’s really cool. And suddenly, they want a page on the dashboard, too. But it goes beyond that. It’s all about educating your people and building that trust and expertise along the way.”