Using swarming to build complex dashboards

This paper reports on a project that took place in a large corporation to build a Customer Profile dashboard to provide a holistic view of its customers. Prior to the project, no such view existed and customer data was distributed across multiple sources and very few people had access to all required sources. In the absence of any co-located team with the required skillsets, the action researcher led a swarming approach to building the dashboard. She found no evidence in the literature of swarming being used for the creation of such digital artefacts. Based on her experience with this project, in this paper she offers insights as to how she undertook the project, the lessons learned, and the benefits (as well as difficulties) in undertaking this project. She found swarming to be a useful mechanism for resolving complex problems. It attacks the problems from diverse and expert perspectives offered by highly motivated team members. In this project, swarming produced a high quality digital solution that stakeholders felt was of superior quality to what otherwise would have resulted.