MONITOR, MANAGE AND IMPROVE OBJECTIVES WITH DASHBOARDS
Visual Analysis Providing Strategic Answers
Dashboards help organizations reach stated goals by leveraging information and
analytics. They provide alignment, visibility, and collaboration across the organization by
allowing business users to define, monitor, and analyze business performance via key
performance indicators (KPIs). Whether organizations choose to implement strategic or tactical performance management initiatives, dashboards can provide the foundation for enabling organizations to more effectively align their business strategy with execution. Specifically, management dashboards enable performance management by meeting the necessary dashboard requirements of all the company constituencies.
Management dashboard deployments, regardless of the particular management methodologies, need to be part of a larger enterprise BI strategy. While the foundation of corporate performance management is a combination of methodologies, processes, and metrics tailored to an enterprise’s needs, a CPM solution will only become truly effective when it is embodied in systems. This is where BI plays a crucial role. CPM represents the strategic deployment of BI. BI applications deployed as part of a comprehensive strategy provide an environment that can effectively embed CPM in an enterprise.
Deploying dashboards within a larger BI strategy greatly increases IT’s chances of successfully meeting the needs of the business users and the broader organization while providing a significantly reduced TCO. Business users consistently need to perform root-cause analysis that requires drilling from summarized KPIs to detailed transaction-based reports. But the dashboard has to be more than a visual overlay on top of a non-integrated data query tool. Without dashboard-to-enterprise BI system integration, IT experiences the headaches of trying to link metadata and query contexts between disparate and non-integrated query interfaces.
Many organizations want to deploy the dashboard in more sophisticated and intricate application contexts such as with an analytic application deployment or as an extranet that reaches beyond the corporate boundaries. Synergies between management dashboards and analytic apps lead to improvements in both. Analytic applications, which historically acted just as a moderately structured ‘bucket of reports’ achieve greater usability and relevance when performance management guides their construction. And performance management’s tedious and time-consuming tasks of data gathering and metrics calculation become quick and facile, leaving time for greater insight, when automated via an analytic app and its BI platform. Having an integrated dashboard strategy and enterprise BI system also allows IT to deliver dashboards that meet the obligatory demands of an extranet deployment. These include rigorous security, customization, 24x7 reliability, and scalability to tens of thousands of users.
Consider the following impact from dashboard usage:
Organizational Needs
Dashboards enable performance management by allowing
organizational groups to work together synergistically in the following ways:
Alignment. Focus and channel the entire business on commonly agreed upon goals and objectives via dashboard KPIs.
Visibility. Enable the business to track and analyze defined KPIs that not only exist within departmental domains, but also broadly across the entire enterprise.
Collaboration. Provide the organization with a single common view of defined objectives, thereby enabling alignment and joint decision making by company employees, partners, and suppliers.
Business User Needs
From senior management to departmental workers, business users are empowered to drive business performance when dashboards possess the following attributes:
Intuitive. Present an easy-to-use management dashboard to ensure user adoption.
Personalizable. Provide users with the specific performance indicators, analysis functions, and layout personalization necessary for their jobs.
Powerful, interactive insight. Communicate actionable information to decision makers via robust performance indicators, rules and alerts, and advanced analysis capabilities.
IT Needs
IT is looking for a low total cost of ownership (TCO) way to meet organizational and business user requirements. IT needs to deploy a management dashboard that considers the following:
Rapid deployment. Unlike earlier enterprise software initiatives, dashboard deployments must show fast ROI in months rather than years. This requires a development and deployment framework that does not require custom programming.
Leverage existing infrastructure. Unleash the massive investment made in earlier ERP, CRM, and data warehouse initiatives by providing common metrics from multiple nonintegrated data sources.
Organizations need to understand, optimize, and align their business and processes to ensure they reach stated goals by leveraging information and analytics. And whether organizations choose to widely implement enterprise performance management or focus on more tactical-oriented initiatives, it is management dashboards that enable organizations to more effectively align their business strategy with execution.
Organizations interested in dashboards can enable performance management by meeting the necessary dashboard requirements of all the company constituencies. The dashboard must be able to drive organizational alignment, visibility, and collaboration across the extended enterprise. Empowered business users need an intuitive, personalizable dashboard that delivers powerful, interactive insight. IT requires a rapidly deployable dashboard solution that maximizes the existing data infrastructure, is part of a larger enterprise BI strategy, and helps to lower TCO.
Once management and IT have effectively deployed dashboards and implemented performance management, they will find objectives easier to monitor, manage, and improve. This, in turn, will allow the organization to strive towards even higher performance goals. Business performance management becomes an upward spiral that enables a corporation to set ever-higher performance goals that can be attained realistically, predictably, and confidently.
