Dashboards

The term dashboards brings up a number of responses: including the housing for airplane controls, a place to mount your GPS in the car, and surprisingly (to me anyway) the wiki definition of an”application for Apple’s Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard operating systems” (who knew? - I think Wikipedia needs to work on that one.)

In the business intelligence community, dashboard is generally defined as a reporting tool or application that presents metrics or KPIs to an end user. It is meant to mimic the plane reference above, presumably whereby corporate executives could sit in the “cockpit” and watch the dashboard while driving the company. In reality, this rarely if ever happens. The most effective dashboard implementations I’ve seen are targeted at an operations group (say customer care), and are used in a more tactical role. The group leader has the top level view, which displays key metrics for that group along with target values. When she notices a metric that is off base by a certain tolerance (good or bad), she can discuss the delta with the person in charge of that area. The value add for a dashboard is the ability to drill down from the top level metrics, and decompose those numbers into lower level supporting metrics. This fosters communication throughout the group, and allows for quick identification of problem areas or areas of opportunity.

One common misconception is to confuse dashboards with corporate performance management (CPM). CPM is a process for utilizing technology to define measures that drive the business, and then managing to those measures. A dashboard is usually an important component of a CPM initiative, but they are not one and the same. Be particularly wary of a dashboard vendor trying to sell you a CPM solution.

So what are the key takeaways when considering a dashboard?

1. Make sure the business unit(s) are sponsoring the initiative, and have bought in to using it to manage the business
2. Identify data sources for all levels in the business unit, to support drill-down capability
3. Don’t buy into the hype around dashboards transforming the business - its’ a tool, nothing more or less
4. Don’t overlook usability design and testing.  If the application is confusing or difficult to use, it will quickly be abandoned.

This entry was posted on 28. July 2008 at 15:18 and is filed under Industry Buzzwords, Technical Focus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.