The Information Dashboard

A dashboard is a vital tool for monitoring the daily health of your organization. From a single interface, decision makers have access to key performance indicators (KPIs)—actionable information that can be used to effectively guide and track business performance.

At a high level, it may seem relatively easy to build a dashboard. Companies that feel they have a good handle on which performance indicators are of strategic importance to the organization may think collecting, summarizing and consolidating the supporting data shouldn’t be that difficult. However, such oversimplification can lead to a failed project before it ever gets off the ground.

The successful implementation of a dashboard is complex and requires a step-by-step process: a methodology that considers all aspects of the project life cycle. This series of tasks—plan, design, build and deploy—will be similar, regardless of the technology or vendor chosen. When comparing proposals from multiple vendors or the cost of a "do-it-yourself" project, it is important to include all of these steps. Correctly designed and implemented, a dashboard has the potential to bring immediate and considerable return on investment (ROI) to your organization.

1. Plan: Dashboard development begins in the planning phase. Identify the project team members, their roles and overall project objectives. When working within a tight timeline, populating the dashboard is the most critical area of concern. Take care not to underestimate the complexity of the databases in which the data resides. Accessing the data from a myriad of tables requires technical resources with detailed knowledge of the underlying table structure and considerable SQL skill. Define the project budget and take into consideration the work required to create the custom queries for the desired metrics. Set realistic goals for your dashboard project by striking a balance between the primary user’s needs and what you can afford to deliver.

Requirements gathering and prototype—Interview the key stakeholders to determine their needs and expectations. To keep the dashboard project within scope, map these needs and expectations to the pre-established KPIs. To increase the likelihood that the final dashboard will meet users’ expectations, take advantage of available tools and technologies that lend themselves well to prototyping.

2. Design: Once the team approves the dashboard’s content and appearance, the next step is to incorporate major design aspects:

• Refine the user interface and control flow;
• Confirm the data sources for each data element;
• Determine how to "persist" data when historical trending information is desired, but unavailable from the transaction database;
• Define the queries needed to retrieve each data element; and
• Determine drill paths.

3. Build and validate: The "real" development begins at this stage of the project. Several tasks occur here, typically in parallel and closely coordinated with each other.

Front-end implementation—Create the dashboard user interface. Evaluate what graph and chart types best represent the data to be displayed and make decisions regarding grouping data to provide the greatest visibility for cross-analysis.

Query implementation—Create the queries to retrieve the necessary information from the appropriate databases. This step can be particularly complex and time consuming, especially if there are multiple data sources for the various dashboard elements including data from customized enterprise applications for ERP, CRM or SCM.

Configure scheduling, refresh and security—To ensure the dashboard content is up to date, queries need to be configured to run regularly. At the same time, it is important to establish and implement security rules to display the appropriate information for users with different levels of access.
Dashboard validation—As with any software project, when the effort reaches "code complete," both the technical team and the primary users must test the dashboard to ensure it meets the requirements outlined in the project plan.

4. Deploy and maintain: Once the dashboard has been built and tested, it is then deployed into production and security requirements are implemented. With the dashboard in production, or "live," steps must also be taken to provide for ongoing maintenance. Over time, requirements and expectations for the dashboard will change and the dashboard solution should be flexible and open to allow for such inevitable enhancement requests.

Final Note: Build vs. Buy
Building and deploying an executive dashboard takes time, regardless of the vendor or technology that is chosen. Creating the graphical front end is relatively quick and easy, but that’s merely the shell of the dashboard.