Dynamic Dashboards
What would you call a user interface that was easy to read, usually one screen, displays the company’s latest key performance indicators graphically, and was readily available to decision makers?
No, the answer is not “impossible”. In one form or another, business dashboards have been in use since the 1980’s, initially as Executive Information Systems. Their somewhat slow pro-gression into the broader business arena was due primarily to limited distribution capabilities. As a result of more recent improvements in data refreshing and handling, dashboards have become an increasingly popular means of monitoring high-level business objectives at a glance.
Shaped primarily by business function and level of detail, dashboards can address concerns ranging from sales, to human resources, to production, from a strategic, analytical, or operational perspective. Strategic and analytical dashboards are primarily used by decision makers focusing on longer-range questions such as market performance and production forecasts, making use of periodic information and drilling down into underlying factors. Operational dashboards by comparison, used by virtually the entire organization, require monitoring of activities that change frequently and may need immediate attention. The relative urgency of operational issues, their influence on long-term planning, and their importance to the majority of the employees in a company seem to suggest an order of “basics”.
“Basics” in this case pertains to prioritizing business matters throughout the organization and bringing together departmental results used to determine an appropriate course of action. The findings can be displayed in a number of formats, very often pivot tables and charts. The input used to create the dashboard can be in real time or updated periodically as new data becomes available. Although not all reporting requirements can be met by using dashboards, their effectiveness as an alerting mechanism is unmatched.
While quite valuable as a management tool, a dashboard is only as good as the data it represents. Once again, as in any reporting structure, the combination of timeliness, accuracy, and availability has proven to be essential. Much of the avail-able literature on dashboards suggests simplicity of form, maximizing accurate function, sound advice in any business endeavor. Good luck in your pursuit of informative reporting and good decision making.
Thomas Reilly, datatooinfo, Data Analyst, datatooinfo@gmail.com, 215.292.8011