Successful Dashboard Creation

We have reached the point of no return: No matter the industry or line of business, everybody and anybody that has a stake in their organization’s success is clamoring to have a state-of-the-art operational or electronic dashboard at their fingertips. For those of us that make our living in Business Intelligence (BI), this is a welcome development. However, long lasting success and value remains elusive for far too many dashboard implementations. Arranging and packaging the most mission critical data elements of a business so that they seamlessly convey a holistic picture of performance, via dashboard technology, remains a daunting challenge for even the most seasoned IT and business managers. Every month on the pages on Dashboard Insight we see a plethora of visually alluring dashboards with flashy functionality. But these sexy creations are the result of many years or months of painful research, application development, and data Integration.

In the last few years, the complexity of dashboards has grown prodigiously, due most notably to vast improvements in their functional capabilities and heavily increasing data volumes. For example, social networking and social media functionality is quickly becoming an integral part of the dashboard landscape for many businesses. Dashboards that include a “social workspace” will be the norm in a few short years. The social workspace model goes way beyond sharing and collaborating on spreadsheets and Microsoft Word documents over SharePoint; it includes such things as wiki workspaces and weblogs, real-time social media messaging, embedded Youtube video , links to LinkedIn profiles, and much more.

When faced with clients that are lacking in focus and discipline when it comes to building dashboard applications and accompanying infrastructure, I often frame their predicaments in terms of military analogies. This better helps them understand the obstacles in their path and gives them the proper context to overcome their issues. The biggest roadblock is always figuring out how to satisfy a large and diverse audience with a commonly used dashboard; and furthermore, how to prepare and integrate the dashboard’s data elements, so that in order to achieve a true shared situational awareness across business lines.

In our globalized world, where NATO forces constitute the most powerful fighting conglomerate has ever seen, unilateral deployment of armed forces on an international stage is quite rare. Armies from divergent corners of the globe--with different languages, different fighting styles, and different sets of equipment--have to cooperatively fight battles. Because unilateral deployment of troops is a rare occurrence, a common unifying command structure must be established. The same holds true for large-scale dashboard solutions. Establishing joint application development (JAD) groups and setting up a project management office (PMO) will be key factors that contribute to the success of any dashboard application and supporting infrastructure. A project manager with experience in business intelligence and performance management dashboards will be especially important. The project manager should be a resource that is not only familiar with dashboard creation from a general technology or usability perspective, they should have an intimate understanding of the data that will make its way onto the dashboard. They should also have some degree of knowledge about the source systems from which the data originates. If not, they will need to work towards gaining transparency into these systems and document their findings on data heritage and latency.

Here are some of my favorite points to keep in mind when creating an electronic dashboard:

• If business is conducted over state lines or conducted on an international basis, the data architect must devise an elegant way for the dashboard to integrate and display data from different regions and time zones.
• Expanding on the scenario above, foreign languages often pose some of the most difficult challenges to data architects hoping to retain semantic consistency for each dashboard implementation. A somewhat rudimentary but effective solution (from both a cost and functional perspective) is to include multi-language translations in the dashboard’s online data dictionary/glossary.
• Every dashboard should contain a data glossary that describes and defines each data element that appears on the dashboard, as well as every function (at a dashboard level and data attribute level) available, on a user-by-user or user group basis. (Users should never have to click away from the dashboard frame in order to better understand the business meaning of their data or comprehend what functions/operations can be performed against the data.)
• The dashboard must intuitively and quickly convey performance statistics with a few clicks of a mouse. Data should be arranged in such a way as to attract a user’s attention to the most vital data first, giving the user the option to drill down into detailed information or run more dense “small print” reports at their discretion.
• Detailed requirements and systems/business specifications are a prerequisite for a successful dashboard implementation. I know of no one-size-fits-all electronic dashboard that can simply be plugged in to an existing data architecture and logical/physical infrastructure. There will have to be some heavy lifting done with respect to data analysis—from data latency to data federation to data integrity.

Although some of the above bullet points may seem simple, or reek of common sense, it is amazing how many dashboard solutions fail because these factors are not properly considered or property vetted.

The bottom line is that a good electronic dashboard must greatly enhance and facilitate communication and collaboration. A dashboard that is largely static and text-based no longer makes the grade, or adds enough value to BI. Data visualization techniques must be employed wherever possible so that users can find and focus on the most vital business artifacts immediately after logging onto the dashboard. Through creative use of data visualization, the dashboard can be designed in such a way as to provide complete clarity about business performance to each user on a customized basis, persuading them to focus on achieving the best possible outcomes and prompting them to take immediate action toward achieving those outcomes.