Business Dashboards: A Visual Catalog for Design and Deployment

PART 1

INTRODUCTION TO DASHBOARDS

The inspiration for this book stemmed from the surge in demand from companies and government organizations for dashboards that will empower their employees to optimize performance management. Our goal is to provide practical and high value-added content based on three underlying principles:

1. The power of process. It is much easier for a project team to go through an implementation when there is a structured process in place. Everywhere possible in this book, we provide step-by-step tools that can be used in a real-world implementation.

2. The power of examples. This book provides a large number of dashboard examples in order to give the project team and other managers as many ideas as possible for their own dashboard projects.

3. The critical essence of good data architecture. The authors propose that organizations need to deploy a solid and carefully planned data architecture to support sustainable and successful dashboards.

During customer engagements, we have experienced time and again that what can start out as a small project to implement a dashboard for one department within a company often causes a snowball effect and I want a dashboard too attitudes when other departments see the completed dashboard in action. Of course that means that along the way we proved to the information technology (IT) group that we could extract data from various source databases, and we proved to the end users that we could transform that data into useful metrics and present it in a user-friendly and attractive dashboard. Because both the data architecture and the dashboard’s content and functionality are critical success factors to any implementation project, we cover each in detail in this book.

How should you read this book? If you are relatively new to the concept of dashboards and you do not have data extracted from source systems and ready to be used, we suggest you read this book from cover to cover. We have organized it so that it first informs you, then it provides real-world examples to give you ideas, and finally it guides you through the implementation project. If you already have a complete idea of the architecture, the desired dashboard(s) or how to run your project, then we suggest you go directly to the applicable parts of the book.

Exhibit P1.1 highlights the recommended workflow of a dashboard project along with related tools and advice found in this book.

EXHIBIT P1.1 Dashboard Implementation Process

chapter 1

Dashboard Definition

If you drive a car or fly an aircraft, vital information about speed, oil pressure, temperature, and so on is available to you through the dashboard in front of you. Gauges, red and green lights, and odometers are strategically positioned so that with a quick glance, without losing focus on where you are going, you know if everything is okay (or not) and can make decisions accordingly.

Just as drivers and pilots rely on their dashboards to do their jobs, managers today are increasingly turning to business dashboards to help them run their organizations. The ideas and benefits are very much the same as the example with the driver: Give managers a dashboard that on one well-designed screen shows the key information they need to monitor the items they are responsible for, and then they can quickly discover problems and take action to help improve the performance of their organizations.

Although this book is focused on the topic of business dashboards, it is good to have an understanding of the broader area of business intelligence (BI) software because they are closely related. BI software first arrived on the market in the late 1980s labeled as Executive Information Systems. They promised senior-level managers colorful, graphical screens with big buttons to make it easy for a nontechnical executive to see what was going on within the company. The major problem at that time was that data was not readily available because of proprietary databases (or simply no database at all) and lack of good extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) tools to get data from the source and into the dashboard in an automated and meaningful way. It was not until the early 21st century that databases, ETL tools, and dashboard software had matured to a level that made sustainable, organization-wide dashboards a realistic possibility.

The term business intelligence was coined in 1989 by Howard Dresner, a research analyst at the Gartner Group. He popularized business intelligence as a broad term to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems. Performance management is built on a foundation of BI but marries it to the planning and control cycle of the enterprise—with enterprise planning, consolidation, and modeling capabilities.

Since around 2005, BI software has been one of the fastest growing business software technologies in the world. As more and more users, vendors, and industry analysts have focused in on BI, a number of interchangeable or overlapping terms have been introduced. A more narrow area of BI is business performance management; the following definition emerged in 2003:

Business performance management is a framework for organizing, automating and analyzing business methodologies, metrics, processes and systems that drive business performance.¹

In other words, business performance management (BPM or Corporate performance management, Enterprise performance management, or Operational performance management) is a set of processes that helps organizations optimize their business performance. In this book we will mostly use the term Business Intelligence (BI) and we will categorize dashboarding as a part of BI. Most people agree that the area of BI includes the following processes and related technologies:

• Budgeting

• Forecasting

• Reporting

• Strategic planning

• Scorecarding

• Analysis

• Dashboarding

• Data mining

• Data warehousing

In summary, BI helps businesses make efficient use of their financial, human, material, and other resources. Good executives have always sought to drive strategy down and across their organizations, but without proper decision support systems they have struggled to transform strategies into actionable metrics. In addition, they have grappled with meaningful analysis to expose the cause-and-effect relationships that, if understood, could give valuable insight for their operational decision makers.

BI software and related methods allow a systematic, integrated approach that links enterprise strategy to core processes and activities. Running by the numbers now means something in the form of planning, budgeting, reporting, dashboarding, and analysis and can give the measurements that empower management decisions. When properly implemented, these systems and processes also motivate information workers to support organizational objectives by giving them actionable tools, objectives, and information.

Data warehouses and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) (see Part 2 for more detail) are two of the fundamental technologies that have supported the adaptation and long-term success of modern dashboards. Whereas the data warehouse gathers, organizes, and stores information from various internal and external data sources, OLAP adds business logic to data by calculating and aggregating it. Together, these two technologies allow a dashboard to

• Display data that originally came from many sources

• Display metrics that are the result of simple or complex calculations

• Quickly provide new information on the screen, with minimal processing time

• Offer drill down from summary data to detailed transactions

For managers, dashboarding is now perhaps the most popular area of their BI strategy, and after about 20 years of evolution in BI software and related technologies, this business tool is coming of age.

Finally, just as there has been an evolution in the equipment available in a car’s dashboard, there has been an evolution driving business dashboard technology. Whereas the first dashboards predominantly were a set of cool charts and indicators placed on a single screen or piece of paper, today’s dashboards are increasingly more versatile (see Exhibit 1.1).

EXHIBIT 1.1 Evolution of Automobile Dashboards versus Business Dashboards

Automobile dashboards are now starting to include GPS (geographic positioning system) screens. Drivers not only know how fast they are going and how much gas is left; they can also plot the destination, select a route, and monitor the course on the GPS screen. Just like an organization’s strategy and tactics, the GPS allows drivers to have a structured plan for where they are going and how they are getting there. Along the same lines, many of today’s business dashboards can include strategy maps and scorecards, thereby integrating the monitoring of strategy and tactics along with the other analysis provided by the dashboard, so that at any point in time an information worker can stay on course.

This book is focused on how to successfully deploy dashboard technology with valuable metrics and graphical components to help your organization’s employees manage and improve performance.

NOTE

1

David Blansfield, Business Performance Management Magazine, June, 2003.

chapter 2

Dashboards’ Role in a Business Intelligence Solution

Some dashboards may be used completely stand-alone, but more typically they are integrated with—or deployed as part of—a larger business intelligence (BI) solution that serves a number of other performance management functions (see Exhibit 2.1).

ENTERPRISE PORTALS

One of the most popular mass-deployment platforms for dashboards is an enterprise portal. Also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP) or corporate portal, an enterprise portal is a framework for integrating information, people, and processes across organizational boundaries.

When dashboards that support portals are deployed, the resulting solution provides several benefits to an organization:

• Users have a single location to access their dashboards as well as documents, presentations, and online discussions, along with other applications.

• Single sign-on is made possible (as opposed to maintaining multiple passwords and having to log in to multiple applications).

• Efficiency is increased as users can go to a single place to access a variety of related and unrelated information.

• A central point is established for an organization to deploy many or all of its BI applications.

EXHIBIT 2.1 Dashboards and Performance Management

Not all BI applications support portal deployments, but all web-based applications can be accessed through hyperlinks, and as such the links can be embedded in the most relevant areas of a dashboard portal page. This can aid users in providing access to information that has relevant context to a dashboard or a component on a dashboard. For example, a hyperlink to a detailed financial report could be placed next to a financial chart showing actual and budget figures for an entire Profit and Loss report.

DASHBOARDS AND STRATEGY

Once an organization has developed strategies and tactics, it can use strategy maps and scorecards that help managers visualize and track their goals and tactics. Modern dashboards (often as part of deployments in portals) can then display or integrate with these tools. Well-planned and well-designed dashboards can effectively display key performance-related charts and indicators together with strategy maps and scorecards to help an organization focus their employees on the most important performance-related activities and drivers.

DASHBOARDS AND PLANNING

What do dashboards have to do with planning? The main role of a dashboard is to provide a means for managers to monitor, analyze, and sometimes annotate (e.g., explaining variances in an embedded scorecard), and there are several strong ties to planning and budgeting:

• Displaying, analyzing, and comparing historical figures with budgets, forecasts and targets

• Focused dashboards for deep analysis of budgets and forecasts (For example, this can be particularly effective when dashboards are fully integrated with planning tools, and organizations utilize a continuous planning methodology. Managers can then analyze trends and variances in a dashboard, almost immediately revise a forecast, and then see it updated back in the dashboard in near real time.)

• Monitoring and sharing of strategies across business units

• Monitoring of resource allocation figures whereby business units can propose investments of discretionary funds in various programs and projects.

DASHBOARDS AND REPORTING

Although it is not typical to use major portions of a dashboard to display detailed reports (then it would be more like a report-board), it can be highly effective to embed links to reports within a dashboard. This provides managers with detailed views of information that can support analysis done in embedded scorecards and charts. These reports also offer a professional format for printing or e-mail distribution.

In addition, most dashboards do not reflect real time—that is, they are based on data that on a periodic basis is loaded from transactional databases into a data warehouse and into Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes. However, in some scenarios, usually in operational dashboards, managers need to see detailed real-time information in order to support the analysis they do using a dashboard, and then real-time reports that pull data directly from the source database can come in very handy if the data is only a click away from the dashboard.

DASHBOARDS AND ANALYTICS

Most modern dashboards offer a number of important analytical features. These are important to users to enable them to answer most questions right from the dashboard interface without having to log in to other software packages or modules to do further analysis. However, for a number of years, while vendors are working on developing the ultimate dashboard that can do sophisticated analysis right from within the same interface, most business intelligence companies will connect the user to a separate module for such tasks.

A majority of the comprehensive business intelligence suites on the market today offer dashboards that are tightly (or lightly) integrated with powerful analytics modules that offer various functions such as heat maps, drill down, statistical analysis, data mining, predictive analysis, and the like. Together with business dashboards these specialized analytics tools further empower managers and analysts to support performance management initiatives.

chapter 3

Why Dashboards Have Become so Popular

If you have ever been in a position where you either have too many data sources (such as ten reports from five different people) or you have to find and analyze information in hard-to-read spreadsheets or lengthy report formats, you do not have to see many dashboards before you want one yourself. So in the early years of the 2000s with software prices coming down, new business intelligence (BI) technologies hitting the market, and data sources opening up, dashboarding suddenly became a mainstream word in corporations and governmental organizations worldwide.

DASHBOARD BENEFITS

Here is a list of some typical benefits of dashboards:

• Improved decision making and performance:

• Ability to easily identify and correct negative trends

• Ability to make better informed decisions based on collected BI

• Ability to measure the organization’s efficiencies and inefficiencies

• Ability to perform improved analysis through visual presentation of performance measures

• Ability to align strategies and organizational goals

• Employee efficiency gains:

•