How Automated Report Certification Will Change The Way People Consume Data

Restoring Consumer Trust

You may have heard about our recent announcement of our dynamic and automated dashboard certification methodology being patent-pending; an exciting milestone for both Wiiisdom and the Analytics Governance space. It symbolizes the uniqueness of this feature and completely embodies Wiiisdom’s vision.

Certification is a way to prove to stakeholders that their content is accurate, reliable, and ready to use. Despite the extensive efforts invested upstream, it’s not uncommon for business users to reconcile their data themselves manually or in Excel. This reality underscores a significant challenge: even amidst innovations like AI, BI & Analytics adoption remains low, with trust being a major barrier to wider adoption. At Wiiisdom, we want to change that. We want to enable everyone to make decisions with confidence thanks to BI and Analytics, and we believe it’s essential to restore trust to achieve this.

We see it like this: consuming data in a dashboard is like consuming any other product, the product here being a dashboard, a KPI, a metric, a GenBI insight, or a BI report—in short, an analytics product. We want to align how we consume products in our lives with how we should all consume data. How can a data or BI team create trust factors in their field? For example, much like checking the expiry date of food products is important, it’s crucial for data consumers to know whether the dashboard they’re using is validated, and this is where certification can play a crucial role in demonstrating this.

Certification At A Glance

So what is certification and why is it so important in today’s climate? Our innovative capability not only visually informs a data consumer if all the defined quality checks (technical or business rules) run on a dashboard or report have passed or failed, and when, but also does so dynamically and in real-time. It’s a visual confirmation that what they’re viewing has been tested and certified for accuracy so that they can make reliable decisions. It’s an incredible step towards restoring trust and breaking down the barrier to wider adoption of BI & Analytics.

Consume Data Like You Consume Everything Else

To better understand how we believe trust can be restored in analytics, let’s come back to the comparison between a data consumer and a food consumer. Similar to how food consumers seek out items that are both healthy and safe, data consumers rightfully expect to have data that is both precise and current. In both scenarios, trust is pivotal as it guides the consumer’s decision-making process.

Today with Wiiisdom, a BI team can certify their analytics products, which should be handled like any other product we consume, i.e. they should indicate quality guarantees to reassure the consumer and be certified to demonstrate to the data consumer that they have been validated. Trust marks, reviews, and product certifications have thus emerged as vital evidence of authenticity, providing the assurance needed for informed decisions.

What if certification went a step further?

Consider how we typically choose a restaurant. The initial step for most of us involves checking the reviews and prioritizing the most recent ones. After all, the relevance of a review diminishes with time—what significance does a review from 5 years ago hold today? Now, apply this logic to data consumption. Would you feel comfortable making decisions based on a dashboard that hasn’t been certified or validated in the past week let alone a month, given the risks associated with using unreliable data? There’s a clear link between how consumers behave with reviews and how data consumers should behave with unvalidated BI content. Just as a five-year-old review offers little assurance, basing decisions on uncertified dashboards or reports is equally precarious.

Gartner recommends using certification or watermarks to validate content and even suggests organizations go beyond that with levels of certification (e.g. bronze, silver, and gold) to ensure the integrity of the dashboards, reports, or datasets. Thus, extending the importance of certifying your analytics products.

Create New Standards of Certification

Having certified dashboards and reports is a necessity in today’s data-driven world. Just as we wouldn’t consume food that doesn’t seem safe to eat, we shouldn’t be making decisions on uncertified dashboards and reports. Our certification capability marks a significant step forward guaranteeing that the data made available to data consumers is reliable and trustworthy.

If you’re interested to put in place our certification capability for your dashboards and reports, get in touch with us.