The Fifth Elephant 2026 Winter Edition

• Talk: 30-40 mins

Describe your session in 2 paragraphs.

When enterprise dashboards fall short of meeting the data needs of business teams, users tend to build a parallel layer of shadow dashboards around them. Shadow dashboards are spreadsheets and data views that are a) manually created by business teams, b) stored locally, and c) recreated outside of official data and architecture systems.

While they duplicate effort, shadow dashboards are also a practical response from teams looking for flexibility and control over their data, particularly when user research, design and data governance move slower than changing business needs and workflows.

Over time, shadow views become key interfaces for decision-making, taken into meeting rooms as sources of truth. But they are inherently risky, as they are locally governed, unvalidated copies of data, which can even push teams into data brawls. Instead of aligning on next steps, teams end up debating and reconciling numbers.

Mention 1-2 takeaways from your session.

In this talk, I’ll draw on my experience working with large-scale digital transaction data on how data systems can be designed to better support the work people currently take to shadow dashboards. This includes solutions that enable investigations, alerts, drill-downs, root-cause analysis, data exports as part of user workflows, while operating within constraints of expensive queries, performance at scale, and user behaviour shaped by inertia, training, and adoption.

Which audiences will benefit most from your session?

This talk is for developers, analysts, designers, and product builders working on complex, multi-stakeholder data systems. Any data points shared during the talk will be anonymised, and presented for illustrative purposes only.

Add your bio: who you are, where you work, and any relevant context.

Surbhi is a data journalist and data visualisation designer who turns complex numbers into memorable visuals through code, design and data-driven storytelling. Her journey has taken her through different settings, such as the urgency of newsrooms, immersion of academia, clarity of communications, and creativity of design studios. She has worked with xKDR Forum, Mint, World Bank, Thibi and the Open Network for Digital Commerce, and is an active member of VizChitra, India’s data visualisation community. Her work has appeared in Kontinentalist, Nikkei Asia, Indiaspend, The Hindu, and more, and has been recognised by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW), Festival de Datos, and The Pudding.

Optional: What don’t you know yet, or what do you want help with?
This can be an open question, unresolved challenge, missing dataset, technique you are unsure about, implementation blocker, or a place where you want critique.

Shadow dashboards are an inevitable part of working with complex data systems. I don’t expect shadows to disappear completely, but I’m interested in exploring how we can minimise their need while preserving the flexibility and control that makes them useful to business teams. The open question for me is how far better system design can go in absorbing those needs.

Optional: match making tags - choose any that apply:

• I can help with: ideas / experience / technique / dataset / collaborator intro / critique / facilitation
• I need help with: ideas / experience / technique / dataset / collaborator / critique
• I’d like to meet: researchers / practitioners / domain experts / tool builders / dataset owners / facilitators}

Topic/domain tags - choose 2-3 broad tags that describe your session or problem space.

Dashboards, analytics, system design, enterprise scale data, data governance, data workflows