Enterprise Dashboards Overview
Let’s talk about dashboards and what they mean for a business.
First and foremost, what is a dashboard? It’s a management tool that shows “vital signs” for your enterprise, aggregating data from a wide range of business systems to provide key performance indicators in a clear and easily readable fashion. A well designed dashboard can identify negative trends, measure efficiency, help plan both short-term and long-term strategies, and align them with organizational goals. It can also save time by keeping the most important information in one place.
An important feature of any dashboard is the timeliness of presented data; for a trader it’s important to see real-time prices on a stock exchange and up to the minute financial news; a state department of transportation would benefit from having updated information on traffic for the major highways; while a system administrator needs to be prompted about a problem or issue in the company’s IT infrastructure.
Also, the type of data presented should be relevant to the user – a project manager doesn’t need to immediately know current call volume in the customer support department, but customer the support manager might need to know current status of a development project.
One of the defining factors in dashboard adoption is interface design – whether or not it keeps you on course or confuses you and forces to use other sources of information defines whether one is going to use it for her daily activities and decision making. As a designer you should use intuitive and easy to recognize indicators, the simplest of which are based on the traffic light system: green is good, yellow means alert and red signals failure. Those signs are universally acceptable and can be used in any area: in a project manager’s dashboard a color-coded alert can be linked to overspendings or sliding timelines; traffic light on an investor’s dashboard may warn regarding a stock performance.
Ease of use is the key factor for a successful dashboard – bad design causes data presentation to become overwhelming by adding too much information and too many details. If it takes a CEO ten seconds to find the company’s share price among numerous small-sized widgets on the dashboard page, he will probably stick to using Yahoo Finance instead. Graphically, a well designed dashboard shows high level process information, with the ability to drill-down to the lower level details which might otherwise be buried deep within the corporate enterprise and difficult to find. The less cluttered the dashboard is, the easier it is to find pertinent information.
Creating dashboards in SharePoint has become more and more popular with the latest release of MOSS 2007 which is packed with features like Excel Services, BDC (Business Data Catalog) integration, Web Services, etc. making for powerful enterprise dashboards.
A good example of a Sharepoint dashboard is a Marketing KPI Dashboard from SharePoint Community Portal (live demo is here):
And to draw the final line to today’s posting, I wanted to add three core principles of a dashboard design (from a recent article in CIO Today “The End Game for Business Intelligence”):
1. The Rule of placement
Ideal dashboard must be placed where it cannot be missed or ignored.
2. The Rule of Design
Conveying information correctly, intuitively, and in a pleasing way is a challenge that even the best designers can struggle with. Partly a matter of deciding on the appropriate content in terms of which metrics and what types of charts, and partly a matter of observing (or trail-blazing) the correct visual design approaches, this skill set is finally developing as it needs to.
3. The Rule of Accuracy
We all learn to pay attention to things that prove to be reliable and ignore those that are just noise. Even if your dashboard is placed in a way such that you simply can’t ignore it, and design such that it is a joy to behold and use, you WILL NOT USE THE DASHBOARD IF IT GIVES YOU WRONG INFORMATION! It’s as simple as that.