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Are You Dashboard Ready?
by: Joe Roberts, Principal Consultant,
BECP, SLE, MCP
Now you probably think
I am going to ask you if you have purchased a dashboard product or defined your
dimensions and measures or built your metric semantic layer. While all of these
are important they are simply deliverables for deploying a dashboard and not a real
test of your organization's dashboard readiness.
Dashboards are quickly
becoming the new “front door” for Business Intelligence. Information Workers, Managers
and Executives are becoming increasingly aware of the value of the exception driven
data visualizations that dashboards provide. As well they are pressuring Business
Intelligence professionals to provide them with dashboards. Before you begin it
will be critical for you to understand what drives dashboards and what defines a
successful dashboard.
In a word it is maturity.
The more mature your BI platform and its associated content the more successful
your dashboards. It’s true that dashboards display exception and conditions within
the data and after all isn’t that what users are looking for when they look at report?
Well yes and no. While a report may provide a sometimes all too ugly way for users
to spot exceptions, a report also provides something else; why. A dashboard can
usually tell them what and even when, but what it can’t tell them is why. For that
function we need to rely on our bank of reports, ad-hoc queries and OLAP applications.
The greater the depth and breadth of these types of content the more successful
the dashboard. This only comes with maturity.
There are multiple
types of dashboards - Strategic, Tactical and Operational. Each type has different
requirements in timeliness, flexibility and depth. While it may be true that some
Strategic dashboards may be able to exist without much depth of content these are
typically designed to satisfy specific executive initiatives and are short lived.
They are also difficult and time-consuming to maintain and are often inaccurate.
The one attribute that all successful dashboard implantations have is the maturity
of the platform and its content.
So if you’re BI platform
is truly ready how do you begin? Well that’s a subject for the next installment
of Roberts Rules of Order. See you next time for “Can you define your company?”
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