Inspiration
Across organizations, dashboards are everywhere—but decisions are still slow. Leaders frequently face conflicting metrics such as revenue growth alongside declining profit, turning meetings into debates about which number to trust. This problem is not about missing data; it’s about conflicting truths. We were inspired to address this overlooked but critical gap in analytics by building a solution that helps teams resolve metric conflicts and move forward with confidence, instead of arguing over dashboards.
What it does
Insight Arbiter is a decision-intelligence solution built using Tableau Next and delivered via Tableau Cloud that resolves conflicting business metrics. It automatically detects KPI conflicts across dashboards, explains why the disagreement exists, evaluates the confidence of each metric, understands the decision context, and previews the impact of prioritizing one metric over another. By doing so, Insight Arbiter transforms analytics debates into clear, actionable decisions.
How we built it
We designed Insight Arbiter as an interpretive layer on top of Tableau analytics rather than a replacement for dashboards. Using realistic enterprise datasets, semantic KPI definitions, parameters, and calculated logic, we implemented conflict detection, confidence scoring, decision-context awareness, and simple impact previews. The solution is intentionally explainable and rule-driven, ensuring it is both demo-ready and credible within Tableau’s platform capabilities.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was solving a complex, real enterprise problem without over-engineering the solution. We had to balance innovation with clarity—avoiding black-box AI while still delivering meaningful guidance. Another challenge was ensuring the system provided decision help without “choosing for the user,” keeping Insight Arbiter supportive rather than prescriptive. Careful scope control and precise storytelling were critical to making the solution both understandable and believable.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of tackling a fundamental BI problem that many analytics tools overlook: metric conflict and decision paralysis. Insight Arbiter goes beyond visualization to demonstrate how Tableau can support decision intelligence while remaining transparent and enterprise-ready. We also delivered a focused prototype that clearly shows value in minutes—something judges can easily evaluate and imagine at scale.
What we learned
We learned that trust and interpretation are just as important as data accuracy in analytics. Conflicting metrics are inevitable in real businesses, but decision delays don’t have to be. We also learned that simple, explainable logic—when grounded in real business context—can be more powerful than complex models that users don’t trust or understand.
What's next for Insight Arbiter
In the future, Insight Arbiter could expand to support additional decision contexts, learn from historical decisions and outcomes, and integrate with governance and metric management workflows. Over time, it could evolve into a standard decision layer within Tableau, helping organizations consistently align metrics, reduce friction in decision-making, and increase trust in analytics at scale.
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