Competitive Intelligence: What Is Your Dashboard Report Telling You? Chances Are, Not Much.

But there are a few caveats to this state of “data geekdom.” First, ideally, the data has to be good. Second, it has to be the right set of data for the insights gleaned to have any basis in reality. The problem for most law firm leaders is that they dig into data with the assumption that they are reviewing the “right” data. More often than not, the data points are “out-of-the box” configurations that a developer somewhere decided were important, with little emphasis on customizing reporting mechanisms based on a firm's needs.

As an example of how important this is, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the financial services industry was actually a trailblazing sector for innovation and technology. As options rapidly increased for consumers to access their private accounts and financials, the popularity and necessity of customer call centers also grew, which underscored the need for automated systems to support the customer service representatives. For instance, a customer would contact a commercial bank's call center and the service rep would have a monitor system in place to bring all the information they needed about that customer together on one screen and facilitate the call. The system was adaptive, changing the information presented onscreen as the call progressed. At the time, this was revolutionary, but today we take it for granted.