Dashboards are powerful business tools that empower users to make better decisions by providing the right information at the right time. Dashboards display real-time or near real-time metrics and can trigger alerts when predefined thresholds are exceeded. Effective dashboards are event-driven, have robust business rules for alerts, and provide a collaborative environment for discussion. Key components of dashboards include metrics, alerts, visualization, and support for different user roles.

1. Dashboards: Driving Decision Making Mary Chant, Certified Usability Analyst http:// www.uiandme.com

2. Dashboards: : Driving Decision Making

4. Dashboard: Business Activity Monitoring Business Activity Monitoring – BAM – a right-time system enabling organizations to monitor and manage business processes that span multiple systems, departments, and organizations. BAM is basically another label for an operational dashboard. BAM characteristics: 1. Event-driven processing model that captures events in real time from multiple systems that comprise an end-to-end business process. 2. Robust business rules that let users define alerts, targets, and thresholds for individual performance metrics. 3. A business-user-friendly dashboard that updates metrics as events flow through the system and puts metrics into context by relating them to business objectives. 4. A collaborative workflow system that lets one set up formal and informal processes by which users can collaborate and discuss results. * p. 117, definition of an Operational Dashboard, Performance Dashboards, Eckerson

5. Dashboard: Real Time & Right Time Real Time Technologists use the term real time to mean data that are updated instantaneously after an event occurs. Here, the latency between an event and when workers view it on a dashboard is zero. . . In actuality, it is difficult, expensive, and often unnecessary to deliver data in real time with zero latency. Conversely, business people use the term real time to mean something that happens quickly. However, how fast is real time to them? Is it a second? A minute? An hour? In the end, the definition of real time varies from business person to business person. Right Time Right Time. Perhaps, a better term to describe the timely delivery of information to decision makers is right time. Ultimately, business executives do not care about the degree of latency in a performance dashboard. They simply want the system to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make optimal business decisions. Right time puts the emphasis on the business value of information, not its latency. *p. 114, real time vs. right time, Performance Dashboards, Eckerson

6. Dashboard: Components

8. Dashboards: Return on Investment *Enterprise Dashboards, Malik See also: “Reduced Costs Through Business Intelligence Standardization”, Business Objects Case Study

9. Dashboard: Sample Milestones/Effort Chart

12. Dashboard: Sample Evaluation

13. Dashboard: User Requirements “ By treating BI (Business Intelligence) as a set of technologies, most organizations veer off track, building ever-more-complex systems that fail to meet user needs – while what’s really needed is a better understanding of the underlying data and business requirements.” . . . “You need to be business-driven, not IT driven. Otherwise, you get a tool that no one uses.” *Rethinking Business Intelligence, Galen Gruman, Infoworld, 04/02/07 “ With contextual, personalized information at their fingertips, users can rapidly pinpoint problems, detect emerging trends and respond to shifting business conditions.” *Choice with Context: Enterprise Dashboards from Hyperion “The most common customer complaint about analysis applications today is that they are too hard to use.” *Visual Analysis for Everyone, Tableau Software “ You should evaluate the different tools against the specific needs of your end users. Because there is no such thing as a “typical user,” you should first group or segment your users into different profiles. Examples of appropriate profiles may include executives, analysts, general business users, and external users such as customers and partners.” *Choosing a Business Intelligence Standard, Business Objects

14. Dashboard: Vendors Major Dashboard Vendors “For the most part, the vendors who have developed the potential of enterprise dashboards most effectively are the reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) vendors such as: Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Micro-Strategy. Also there are niche vendors such as iViz Group, iDashboards, Noetix, QPR Software, and Theoris, who have developed dashboard software with certain characteristics that have been left out by the major BI vendors.” *Enterprise Dashboards, Malik Vendor Resources http://www.cognos.com/products/now/application-workbench.html http://www.tableausoftware.com/products.htm http:// www.dundas.com/Dashboards/index.aspx?Campaign = ASPAlliancePS http://www.businessobjects.com/products/dashboardvisualization/dashboardbuilder.asp http:// www.iviz.com/portfolio/portfolio.htm http://www.2020software.com/software/display.asp?tMethodID=9&tMethod= category&tse = Google&tst = business+intelligence+dashboards&CMP =KNC-Google Comparison of Top 8 Business Intelligence Software Solutions Vendor Evaluation Industry analysts such as Gartner, Meta Group, and IDC regularly evaluate the different vendors in the market and can help advise on the choice of a particular vendor or product based on your projects. *Choosing a Business Intelligence Standard, Business Objects

15. Dashboard & Alerts “ Although it does so much more, the central purpose of a dashboard is to warn the user when any relevant metrics are out of acceptable boundaries. In the dashboard terminology, these alerts consisting of rules and actions add critical value to an enterprise dashboard deployment complemented with strong visual indicators of warnings. *Business Case for Dashboard Execution, Dashboard Execution “The system should also let developers and end-users define rules about when and how users should be notified if parameters are exceeded for a a given metric (i.e., alerts ) as well as when and how to initiate automated actions based on those alerts (i.e. agents). Visual alerts should be accompanied by text that explains the problem, a report that users can click to see actual data and a URL to initiate additional action, such as to refresh a report or display contact information for someone to call. The rules engine should accept events from third-party systems as well.” *p. 215, Performance Dashboards, Eckerson

16. Alerts: Definition Notifications sent by users or administrators that let users know when a metric exceeds predefined thresholds.