Enterprise dashboards, design and best practices for IT |
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| 06 Dec 2005 | Written by Shadan Malik; Reprinted with permission from John Wiley & Sons |
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Elements for an enterprise dashboard
We have borrowed inspiration from an aircraft cockpit to build enterprise
dashboards, and yet we know that the analogy has some serious limitations.
So, let us establish the basic characteristics specific to an enterprise dashboard
with a useful acronym—SMART. An enterprise dashboard must be SMART in
that it contains the following underlying elements, which are essential for
success:
- Synergetic. Enterprise dashboards must be ergonomically and visually effective for a user to synergize
information about different aspects within a single screen view.
- Monitor KPIs. Must display critical KPIs required for effective decision
making for the domain to which a dashboard caters.
- Accurate. Information being presented must be entirely accurate in order
to gain full user confidence in the dashboard. The supporting dashboard
data must have been well tested and validated.
- Responsive. Must respond to predefined thresholds by creating user alerts
in addition to the visual presentation on the dashboard (e.g., sound
alarms, e-mails, pagers, blinkers) to draw immediate user attention to
critical matters.
- Timely. Must display the most current information possible for effective
decision making. The information must be real-time and right-time.
This order serves the formation of the acronym and does not indicate the
relative priority of these features.
An aircraft-inspired enterprise dashboard must be SMART. However, a
SMART dashboard is not sufficient to ensure effective organizational management.
To the envy of pilots, an enterprise dashboard must have enhanced
characteristics not available even within a cockpit. An enterprise dashboard
should also have some of the following advanced elements, captured in
another acronym—IMPACT:
- Interactive. It should allow the user to drill down and get to details, root
causes, and more. Imagine the dramatic benefit if a pilot could click on
the fuel gauge showing low fuel to view the consumption rate graph
during the past hour, only to find out that the consumption rate shot to
twice the normal usage during the last 15 minutes, indicating a sudden
fuel leak.
- More data history. The dashboard should allow users to review the
historical trend for a given KPI. For example, market share may indicate
strength within the current time period but a negative trend in a
year-ago comparison. A user may then click on the current share to
investigate if a shrinking market share is a sudden phenomenon within
the current time period or a trend for the past several time periods.
- Personalized. The dashboard presentation should be specific to each user's
domain of responsibility, privileges, data restrictions, and so on. For example,
the sales manager for the Eastern region should be presented with
metrics related to that region's performance and perhaps an aggregated
view for other regions for relative comparison. Other aspects of personalization
should be available as well, such as language and visual
preferences for colors and background style, for better user experience.
- Analytical. It should allow users to perform guided analysis such as whatif
analysis. The dashboard should make it effortless for a user to visually
navigate through different drill-down paths, compare, contrast, and
make analytical inferences. In this way, the dashboard can facilitate
better business comprehension within a set of interdependent business
variables.
- Collaborative. The dashboard should facilitate users' ability to exchange
notes regarding specific observations on their dashboards. This could
also be adopted to accomplish workflow checks and process controls.
A well-designed collaboration would serve as a communication platform
for task management and compliance control.
- Trackability. It should allow each user to customize the metrics he or she
would like to track. Such customized tracking could then be incorporated
within the default dashboard view presented to the user after
login. For example, the sales managers for the Eastern and Western
regions may not want to track the same issues. The Eastern region
may be facing a highly competitive pressure with a low market share,
whereas the Western region may have a high market share but an inventory
problem leading to out-of-stock situations.
Again, this order does not indicate the relative priority of these features,
but it provides another acronym to remember easily—IMPACT. Therefore,
an organizational dashboard must have SMART IMPACT.
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