It’s a very important function: provide data that can be cherry-picked to support a decision already made.
If the decision is too complex for that, hire a big consulting firm to write a report suggesting and justifying the action desired.
A decison staple surely going back millennia.
One way to solve is to automate the action from insight part and inject into users workflow. I am looking at this now with support of senior sales stakeholders.
Simple example:
Client X activity has been trending down vs it's peer group, Call Client X to understand what's going on.
Nobody is saying "I'd love another tool that I am expected to check every day", both embedded analytics and insights are how to drive adoption and unlock value from data.
This is part of the expectation of business analysts, that they will surface and communicate data not immediately being asked for by executives or other stakeholders. This usually means running a meeting and presenting findings, and then pairing with another stakeholder to flesh out further opportunity.
If there's no one to pick up the baton, there's very little that can be done about that.
It feels like a good idea, but I imagine it would be very fragile in black swan events.
Maybe a mix?
Provide the dashboards, but allow users to set up alerts/workflows, they understand the problem well, and if they know what they're going to be going to the dash to find, let them skip that step. In case something new happens, they can set up a new alert/workflow/whatever for the next time it happens.
Only works if you've got buy-in from management though.
I reckon of the 90% that don't make any data driven decisions with the dashboards they're provided, there are three causes I run into frequently.
1. They can't describe what info they need
2. That info isn't available.
3. They don't make decisions based on data at all.
I feel I'm getting better at addressing 1 and 2 the more I do it, but I figure there's a fair amount from group 3 who demand the reports nonetheless...
As an aside, you mention Tableau, QlikView or PowerBI, have you tried Apache Superset at all?