Dashboard Graveyards: Why Your $2M BI Investment Is Collecting Dust

Your BI isn’t broken. Your discipline is. Fewer, sharper dashboards, and decision systems that actually get used.

Most executives can’t name five dashboards they actually use.
Ask them. Watch the squirm.

That $2 million BI rollout? A graveyard. Charts nobody opens. KPIs that never drive a single decision.
The problem isn’t bad data… it’s dashboard hoarding disguised as intelligence.

The Sprawl That Kills

Flexport found 2,700 dashboards and kept 60. Decision-making sped up.
They’re not alone.

Enterprises juggle too many tools. They burn cash on plumbing and rarely track usage.
Meanwhile analysts babysit pipelines instead of thinking.

Why Leaders Hoard Dashboards

Smart people… dumb habit.
When instinct feels shaky, leaders ask for more charts.
When charts fail, they ask for more dashboards.
The cycle never ends.

Each unused dashboard is an anxiety artifact. Each abandoned KPI is measurement without management.
The cruel irony: the more data you show, the less people see.

Cleanup Stories

Flexport cut 97 percent and didn’t miss a beat.
Pendo fixed the “20 people, 20 numbers” problem with one source of truth.
Deputy stopped being a dashboard factory… requests dropped from months to days.
ASAPP killed 400 Grafana panels and engineers finally had signal, not static.

The secret wasn’t technology. It was discipline.

The Real Cost of Graveyards

The license fees hurt. The infrastructure bills sting. The training costs pile up.
But the real expense? Human potential.

Half your data team’s energy lost to dashboard upkeep.
Shadow IT multiplying in every corner.
Decisions delayed until markets move on without you.

The graveyard doesn’t just waste money. It buries talent.

Why More Charts = Less Insight

Human attention is finite. Show 47 KPIs and none will matter.

Amazon banned PowerPoint and forced executives to write one-page memos.
Constraint sharpened clarity.
Dashboards need the same treatment.

The best BI makes itself invisible.
You don’t notice the dashboard… you notice the answer.

Four Tests for a Dashboard Audit

1. 1. Usage Test: If no one opened it in 30 days, delete it.
2. 2. Decision Test: If a chart doesn’t trigger an action, it’s clutter.
3. 3. Executive Test: If your CEO can’t use it in 60 seconds, it’s too complex.
4. 4. Consolidation Test: If three teams track the same KPI three ways, you’ve got a governance issue… not a technology one.

The Path Forward

Start with the 80/20 rule.
Keep the 20 percent that drive 80 percent of decisions.
Kill the rest.

People will complain. Let them. Their protests prove they never used them.

The future of BI isn’t more charts. It’s fewer, sharper, decision-ready systems.
Clarity beats completeness. Discipline beats sprawl. And judgment beats dashboards every time.

The graveyard is already full. Don’t bury your choices there.