Transparent Dashboards: Open data practices for promoting competition-as-motivation in business dashboards

Dashboards are a common and familiar format of data visualization and are deployed in a number of fields and across domains, such as business, medical and health, learning analytics, and urban analytics, amongst others. In this paper, we conduct interviews with users of business dashboards, in particular, performance dashboards and scorecards, in order to gain an understanding of how they might be used in daily practice. We discuss how dashboards are not only used, as the literature suggests, to gain a quick understanding of the data but are deployed, by making the data available to everyone, as a means of motivating the users through creating a competitive framing of the data. We discuss the implications of this and how our findings can inform and support approaches to dashboard design, implementation, and usage.