Radha R would like to thank Derick Jose, chief architect with the business intelligence practice at MindTree Consulting, for contributing this month’s column.
In today’s world where people are inundated with more data than they can process, dashboard design plays a very important role as it is the central conduit through which information flows to the decision-maker.
If we do not present the right metrics in the right form at the right time, the business users can end up making the wrong decisions, impacting the business process.
Figure 1: Information Flows to the Decision-Maker
Let’s consider some of the questions faced while designing a dashboard:
- Am I measuring the right key performance indicators (KPIs)? What are the domain specific metrics that are best practices to measure the health of a business process?
- How actionable is the information I am presenting on the dashboard?
- Where did I draw the data for the dashboard from? How hygienic is the quality of the dashboard data?
- Does your dashboard show context to the information? Is the source of information tagged to the dashboard? Can the end user find out when the dashboard information was last refreshed and when the next cycle of refresh is going to be (daily, weekly, monthly)?
- Are the right analytical constructs used to synthesize insights?
- Are the insights disseminated to points of action, empowering people to act on them? Do they know all the action options?
- How actionable are these insights that are disseminated? Are they synthesized?
- Does your dashboard “action enable” the consumer of the information? For example, can they invoke the mail utility from within the portal dashboard to send a mail request or trigger a transaction to reset the reorder point in a supply chain scenario?
- Does your dashboard give the provision of adding end user comments to the information presented?
- Can your dashboard guide a new user through a prescribed path to do analysis in addition to exposing them to cubes to explore data at will?
All of these are critical elements to be addressed as a part of the dashboard strategy.
Benchmark Key Performance Indicators with Industry Standards
The following section distills some of the dashboard related findings I have experienced while executing customer projects.
Figure 2: Dashboarding Best Practices
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