Use Cases Unlocked by Business Intelligence Alerts

Dashboards are fast to build and user-friendly due to great tools such as Tableau. But there are use cases where dashboards are a poor fit.

A year ago the operations team at HopSkipDrive demanded a better solution to replace a suite of existing dashboards. Lacking suitable features in existing tools we built a system that sends real-time alerts to Slack channels. The initial project was a success. What happened over the next few months surprised us: users found 30 additional use cases for real-time alerts.

Those alerts have become an integral part of the service improving safety and user experience on the platform. In addition, alert volume is used as a measure of defects, a component of our overall service level score.

This talk will deconstruct what we learned.
• When are dashboards a poor fit?
• What use cases are well-served by real-time alerts?
• How was the alert service built?
• Using alert volume as a defect score.