Dashboards

Dashboards are an advanced visualisation tool to help business users know how well their business units are performing by being able to better recognise trends and patterns in large amounts of data.

Dashboards represent of a collection of KPI's, each KPI being calculated from underlying data.

The difference between dashboards and scorecards, is that scorecards incorporate methodology around the KPI's, such as Balanced Scorecard used for corporate performance.

Dashboards can be very simple technically, or be highly interactive, with tight integration to OLAP data mining tools.

The most basic dashboards display static graphical representations of performance, whilst more advanced dashboards, known as dynamic dashboards are fully interactive, allowing drill down analysis.

Characteristics of A Dashboard

Today’s dashboards easily integrate into other applications such as BPM tools, supporting all management processes.

For dashboards to be they need to be:

• Tactical Metrics – with an performance and decision supporting focus
• Consistent – all connecting to the same data source
• Interconnected – each dashboard relating to those above and below it, as well as horizontally with upstream and downstream operations
• Unified – with other management tools such as financial reporting systems and forecasting tools.
• Interactive – to support drill down root cause analysis
• Available – central portals accessible by multiple devices, and available offline.

Well constructed dashboard suites help all business users quickly prioritize actions needed to improve business performance, enabling individual users to respond quickly to business dynamics.

Whilst the above characteristics represent the ideal dashboard, great value can be derived from simple dashboards developed using standard desktop tools.

Static Powerpoint Dashboards

A good example of one of the most popular simple dashboards is a project dashboard constructed in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Similar simple Powerpoint dashboards can also be used for operational status reporting, marketing updates, sales updates and service performance.

Using this simple tool, business units are able to exchange data feeds using Powerpoint presentations that contain embedded data tables.

Powerpoint dashboards are a good introduction to the value that dashboards represent, whilst using a tool that is widely used throughout the organisation. PPS files are easy to distribute and easy to access. Powerpoint also provides a reasonable visualisation technology for budget constrained businesses.

Dashboards are no longer the domain of executives and top managers. It is not over reaching for each employee to have their own performance dashboard.

Benefits of Dashboards

The graphical style of dashboards allows:

• Fast absorption of large volumes of performance data
• Transparency of performance throughout the organisation
• Alignment of KPI’s across the enterprise
• Supports communication as to decisions and actions required

Next: Gaining Value From Your Dashboard

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