Transitioning to a Commercial Dashboarding System: Socio-technical Observations and Opportunities

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Conny Walchshofer, Vaishali Dhanoa, Marc Streit, Miriah Meyer

 DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2023.3326525

 Room: 103

2023-10-25T04:00:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2023-10-25T04:00:00Z

Exemplar figure, described by caption below — A summary of our 14 socio-technical observations and three opportunities from an interview study conducted at a large, conventional company as they transitioned to use Power BI.

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Keywords

Interview study, socio-technical challenges, visual analytics

Abstract

Many long-established, traditional manufacturing businesses are becoming more digital and data-driven to improve their production. These companies are embracing visual analytics in these transitions through their adoption of commercial dashboarding systems. Although a number of studies have looked at the technical challenges of adopting these systems, very few have focused on the socio-technical issues that arise. In this paper, we report on the results of an interview study with 17 participants working in a range of roles at a long-established, traditional manufacturing company as they adopted Microsoft Power BI. The results highlight a number of socio-technical challenges the employees faced, including difficulties in training, using and creating dashboards, and transitioning to a modern digital company. Based on these results, we propose a number of opportunities for both companies and visualization researchers to improve these difficult transitions, as well as opportunities for rethinking how we design dashboarding systems for real-world use.