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Dashboard

Are they the 'eye candy' of BI, or powerful analytical tools which enable executives to monitor, measure and control performance?

Certainly, the ability to use a dashboard to understand at a glance whether goals are being achieved, or whether problems are occurring, cannot be underestimated. Many organisations still do the equivalent of digging up the black box after the plane has crashed to see what went wrong. Anything to prevent this is a must.

Some dashboards are a lot more useful than others, which is why there is a fair amount of confusion and cynicism in the marketplace. Things to watch out for are:

• A very colourful user interface. Colours should be used to highlight something requiring attention, not to make the dashboard look pretty (pretty can help with business acceptance, but is a secondary aim).
• Reports that are too complex or incorporate too much information. Elegance and simplicity are the order of the day.
• Useless information. If the information from the dashboard is ambiguous or possibly inaccurate, it cannot be acted upon, so why bother?
• Inability to obtain further information. It is often important to be able to drill through to detailed information on the causes of certain items.
• Noisy indicators that send warnings too frequently. These get ignored very quickly.

Conversely, signals that are well aligned to company goals, and provided in a timely and ‘in your face’ manner, are stupendous at driving focus into what really matters in the business.

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