Lifecycle of a Business Intelligence Dashboard

One naturally assumes that the more mature a business intelligence dashboard gets, the more usage it gets and the more data it shows. But that isn't always the case. Interestingly, I have a great example of a dashboard that lately has gotten less informational.

"But how can that be?", you ask. Well, I'm talking about a dashboard that is meant to track a particular process, one that naturally narrows in terms of its focus. I'm talking about the very popular Yahoo Election 2008 Political Dashboard. Take a look at today's screenshot of the dashboard:



See what I mean? As the life cycle of this particular area of study matures, we'll get less range of data. Yes, we'll have more depth, but visually, we'll have to change the UI or else it will just look like a sparse matrix.