In a time when people are short on patience, time is of the essence, and everyone is accustomed to having information at their fingertips, the at-a-glance access into key performance indicators (KPIs) that dashboards offer is becoming increasingly important.

A digital dashboard consolidates information that is pulled from multiple data sources and transforms the information into a visually rich interactive chart. Digital dashboards are designed to be easy to read, and its framework is modular so you can incorporate the most important information representing your priorities into the dashboards. Essentially, a good dashboard solution will allow users to customize their dashboards to access, analyze and drill down through their information for effective decision making.

A dashboard answers questions like, “What is my month-to-date revenue?”, “Is our pipeline better or worse than this time last year?”, and “Are our receivables being paid on time?”. A good dashboard should answer key questions like these, be easy to use, and at the same time help you better accomplish your job.

A dashboard can bring all your key business data together in a familiar and easy to understand interface, as well as be customized to suit the specific requirements of your business. Dashboards let you focus on business priorities by filtering out information that is not relevant. They also help you spend more time making better decisions rather than wasting time trying to understand what a report is telling you.

If you would like real-time information in the palm of your hand then a digital dashboard is for you!

Renee Cassata, iDashboards

In 2008, iDashboards launched an Olympics dashboard that tracked all of the medals earned by individual countries in the Beijing Summer Olympic Games. The response to the Summer Olympics dashboard was so overwhelming that the tradition continued by building dashboards for the 2008 Presidential Election and the 2009 NCAA March Madness Tournament. Building upon that success, iDashboards is once again developing a tool to track the results of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

The Winter Olympics dashboards can be found at the following URL: http://games.idashboards.com/winter2010?guestuser=vancouver. Fans with websites or blogs dedicated to the Olympics are free to host a link to this dashboard tool for their audience.

The dashboards, which are updated daily, provide a summary of the day’s results and an interactive world map highlights participating countries and their corresponding medal tallies. The dashboards’ unique hover-and-click capabilities enable fans to drilldown through each country’s results by sporting event and individual athlete performance. For devoted Olympic followers, an additional dashboard provides even greater detail and the ability to compare results from across the globe with the help of graphic bar charts, speedometers, gauges, interactive country flags and medals.

These dashboards with mass appeal bring business intelligence to the general public who may not otherwise have a reason to interact with a dashboard.

What dashboard will iDashboards create next?

Stay tuned!

Renee Cassata, iDashboards

One credit union executive stated, “If it’s not getting measured, it’s not getting done.” While credit unions have had a long history of monitoring their key performance indicators (KPIs), the challenge has been getting the information in a timely and consolidated manner.

Currently, credit unions generate these reports in various report-based applications. Excel and Crystal are two very popular report-based applications used by credit unions to supply information on KPIs. One of our current credit union customers said it best – “Before iDashboards software was installed, I was getting our KPIs once a month. By the time I received the report, the information was outdated!”

While applications like Excel and Crystal allow technical people to write and generate reports, they lack the ability to move these reports into a graphically rich dashboard in a timely manner. I have spoken with a number of IT departments in various credit unions that are getting pressure from their own business groups to take these reports and give them a visual interpretation for their daily monitoring.

The credit union Industry has real challenges to overcome when making the decision to implement a dashboard solution. While valid issues such as a lack of budget, no resource employees to set up the charts and graphs, and extreme resistance to change exist, it is not hard to see how credit unions can save money and increase sales by implementing a dashboard solution. An example of how powerful the use of a dashboard solution can be was best illustrated when one of our credit union customers released a new loan product to their branch loan officers. They allowed all 50 loan officers to monitor how many products each salesperson had sold through a simple dashboard. As salespeople are very competitive, this access created a very competitive environment which increased sales on the new product by tenfold.

If you consider the hours it takes the credit union industry to generate their KPI reports using their current applications, it is easy to see how implementing a dashboard solution within these organizations will save man hours, provide real-time KPIs, and most of all it will keep the executives and all of the employees focused on what they need to be “getting done” every single hour of the day.

Lynwood Taylor, iDashboards

Let me put it to you straight. I’m not talking about an ocean view or a magnificent city view from the corner office. This is in reference to a real-time view into the operations and performance of your organization.

An effective way to create such a view is to use the valuable real estate of an executive’s office wall by installing a decent size LCD to display scrolling performance dashboards that are updated every minute to show the live pulse of the organization.

You might ask – how is this different from giving access to the same dashboards through the PC or laptop of the executive? The answer to this requires acknowledging that there are way too many things on that laptop or desktop, and even more so, on the desk of an executive that competes for his/her attention – not to mention smart phones!

Displaying dashboards on an LCD that is front and center for the executive every time he/she walks into the office is a sure way to utilize that 1-minute attention span and convey the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to the organization. When this happens, you can bet that those metrics and KPIs will start looking better. This can be an inexpensive way to keep your senior executives focused on the important objectives of the company.

Once you have had success with this, why stop there? There are many other strategic placements of LCDs to display live performance dashboards such as shop floors, warehouses, lobbies, cafeterias, conference rooms and call centers. The goal of this is to put the key goals and metrics of the organization in front of your workforce so they can retain focus even in the midst of all the distractions they face on a daily basis.

Shadan Malik
President & CEO, iDashboards

Could you give a figure on the spot? What about the persistence rates? How are you trending? These are some questions that, if you do not know the answer, should raise a red flag.

Universities have typically relied on the institutional research department to report back to them on their admission rate. How long does that take? What is the institutional research department’s process to generate the report? How far down on the priority list is it? If your university is like most of the other ones out there, the institutional research department has been ‘streamlined’ due to a reduced budget, making this report move further and further down the list.

I recently had a conversation with an institutional research director at a mid-size university in California. She was the only person left in her department. Two years ago, she had two researchers and an administrative assistant. Since then, she has had no choice but to pick up the work of her displaced employees. I asked her what she was doing to help her cause. Jokingly, she said, “I don’t know, I’m just trying to keep up.” We both laughed, but I know it didn’t do much to make her feel better.

I asked her about what software she used and if it had a dashboard tool. She said she does, but it was so bad that she relied on building charts using Excel. This is how she reported back to the president of the university. This process, as you can imagine, took more time away from her already overloaded responsibilities. It seems like an antiquated practice for a forward-thinking place of higher learning, doesn’t it?

She’s not alone in this fight. I am not aware of any department at a university that is getting a higher budget in July 2010. Most universities are facing 10-15% reductions, so the ones that are staying flat seem to be the lucky ones.

Universities need technology to help them be successful. Spending money on a dashboard software solution may seem a bit daunting at first, but when you have the foresight to know the benefits, a dynamic dashboard tool is a no-brainer.

Jon Salmon, iDashboards

I was recently speaking with a reference for a new hire we have joining our company. He asked me what we do, so I explained that we are in the dashboard software space and told him a little about our solutions. He mentioned how he worked for Sun Microsystems during the days when Scott McNealy was actively involved and had the opportunity to interact with him frequently. He said that being from the metro Detroit area, Scott’s family all worked in the automotive industry and Scott always used car analogies in his presentations and business discussions.

This gentleman is a long time technology sales and sales management executive and said that he relates dashboard software to a car analogy. He said he loves selling technology, but rarely uses it or understands it. He loves his car, but knows very little about how it works. He has owned his most recent car for three years and has never even looked under the hood – he only uses the dashboard to let him know it is running fine. If there is a problem it shows up in one of his indicators on the dashboard and he takes it to a shop where people understand how the car works and they fix it. At work, he relies on his dashboard software pulling data from his CRM system to present the information he needs to do his job. He admitted that he has never even used the application beyond the dashboard because it provides him everything he needs to know about his sales organization and the area of the business he is responsible for – sales.

Some people use a tachometer to make sure they shift at the right time to optimize performance like race car drivers. Some like to take cars apart and re-build them. Most just want to get in and drive where they need to go, and some want to look cool doing it.

This is very similar to the world I live in – Dashboard Software and Business Intelligence. A small percentage of users want to do complex things with their data – slice and dice, analytics, etc. Statistically, this represents 15% or less of the users of business intelligence tools. Most users just want the data that pertains to what they need to do to make a living and help their company. They want the ability to see it in almost real-time, depending on the data, and it would be great to drill down if they see any problems.

One of the problems with our space is that in order to drive up consumption, many business intelligence vendors have pushed complex products on the average business user. This has led to a lot of frustration from the customer standpoint. Overkill would be a good word to use here. The more complex the solution the longer it usually takes to roll out, leading to very expensive, long-term projects. User adoption rates have been low due to the complexity, leading to a lot of really expensive shelf-ware.

As with any initiative, make sure you understand your true needs before looking at products that will solve the problem. If you aren’t planning on having high paid senior executives slice and dice data, then don’t force a product upon them that does that. The true cost of software includes the purchase price, as well as the cost of resources needed to install, configure and maintain it. But there is also a cost that is harder to quantify – the cost of the users not using it and not deriving the initial intended value that was hoped for.

Dave Ferguson, iDashboards

Measuring ROI for dashboard deployments can be challenging because a lot of ROI is what we would deem as “soft” ROI. Also, much of the value of dashboards comes from things like time savings, better access to data and better visibility into information which are hard things to measure quantitatively.

I recently had a discussion with one of our customers and I thought this was a great example of possible ROI. They are a large company that has a tremendous amount of inventory in their warehouses. One of the goals they set for the year was to reduce their inventory on hand in their warehouse by 3%. Reducing the inventory in their warehouses each year would equate to tens of millions of dollars in cost savings.

So, they spent many hours with high priced executives to come up with this goal and stood to gain a lot if achieved. Now, how could they push this down to the people that would actually be the ones to achieve it? Voila, a dashboard! Previously when they tried to set goals and measure performance or actual, they had to use reports from their warehouse inventory management system. This was usually in the form of reports with a lot of text that was hard to read and information that was generally out dated.

The solution was a dashboard that could present the target and actual data in a simple visual format to the users in near real-time. By doing so, they accomplished two goals. One, they gave better, more timely visibility in an easily digestible and understandable format to the workers in charge of the inventory. Secondly, they gave access to the supervisors and senior managers that were responsible for reaching the goal giving them visibility and driving accountability. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.

The end result was an inventory reduction of 6%, doubling their original goal and saving them a ton more. Was this the dashboard that did this? No, it was the tool that enabled them to track, monitor, and be accountable to the goal. So what is the ROI for the dashboard piece? In this case the customer could care less.

Dave Ferguson, iDashboards

The process of storyboarding a dashboard can be quite daunting when you begin. The design possibilities are endless, and a formal set of guidelines doesn’t exist for creating a logical, information rich dashboard. So, where to begin?

Well, you’ve collected the dashboard project stakeholders into a room and you’re now staring at a blank whiteboard. The following is a loose sequence of steps to get you moving in the right direction:

1. Agree upon the purpose and audience of the dashboard. This will help guide you as you determine which metrics to display in the dashboard.
2. Draw a four frame dashboard on the whiteboard (each frame will display a chart). Even though you may add or subtract frames as you proceed through the design process, having something visual to look at removes much of the ambiguity of the design process ahead.
3. Identify a metric that will be displayed in the dashboard. To ensure you communicate all the necessary information about the metric to the dashboard audience, determine the “Product, Group and Timeframe” for the metric. For example, if you would like to show the current month’s average sales versus the same month last year for each Sales Manager and each Account Manager in their team, use the “P, G, T” format below to ensure you capture all the information.
P – Average Sale Value ($)
G – By Sales Manager, then by Account Manager
T – Current Month vs. Same Month Previous Year
Note the “then by” in the Group category. This indicates a drilldown in the chart.
4. Repeat Step 3 for each metric you would like displayed in the dashboard. As a rule of thumb, shoot for four to six metrics in a dashboard. However, some dashboards may only show one metric, others may show 10 or more.
5. For each metric you identified, determine the chart type that would best display the data. Draw a mock-up of the chart in the dashboard you have created on the whiteboard. For the metric discussed in Step 3, a column chart would be a good choice.
6. The final design step is to determine the colors to be used in the dashboards. Often it is a good idea to call upon your web designers to assist with this step. It is also common to agree upon a color theme during the storyboarding process, but to make final color decisions during the actual dashboard building process.

Storyboarding a dashboard is much like painting a picture – the more you do it, the better you become. After gaining some experience, you will see opportunities and pitfalls during the storyboard process versus discovering them during the dashboard build process. You will also discover your own design style over time, and find that storyboarding can be quite easy and enjoyable once you get the hang of it.

Trip Dixon, iDashboards

There seems to be a lot of hype around the term “Software as a Service” these days. Introduced in 1999, SaaS is a model of software deployment where a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. It is one of the fastest growing segments of the information technology (IT) industry because it provides a more cost-effective alternative for organizations to achieve their business objectives than traditional applications. With cloud computing and SaaS appearing on the scene, business intelligence (BI) solutions no longer have to be unmanageable, risky and expensive, but now can happen in a matter of weeks at far lower costs.

Many companies are wary, as they should be, of their most valuable corporate asset being moved outside of their enterprise data servers and firewalls and into a cloud where they have reduced control. However, any certified SaaS provider will be utilizing a robust data center and have an extensive means of application and data security coupled with an impassable network set-up.

Since BI SaaS applications are hosted by a service provider and do not require any hardware or software installation on the user end, SaaS users generally do not have to worry about the installation and customization of BI software and be sidetracked with keeping software licenses up-to-date and synchronized throughout the enterprise. A more important reason for taking advantage of SaaS is that it can significantly reduce the need for buying and maintaining expensive hardware, especially with respect to data and application servers. Furthermore, there is a reduced cost of deployment, and the overhead associated with data security can be offloaded to the service provider.

With all of these benefits, why would you not want your dashboard in the clouds?

When you look at a well-balanced financial portfolio, generally there will be short-term and long-term assets. There may be a group of blue chip stocks that you are looking to hold onto for the long run that may have ups and downs, but over time the return will be nice. You may also have short-term high growth stocks that you may or may not hold onto for the long term.

I had a conversation with Howard Dresner, long time Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst and Strategist (www.howarddresner.com), recently and he discussed how software should be viewed in the same mode.

BI software has been very hot for a long time now and remains so. Many companies have rolled out, started down the path or are considering rolling out an enterprise BI platform. The problem is that enterprise BI initiatives take a long time to implement. The average BI stack roll out is in the 18 to 36 month range, but can be longer. Add the fact that 18% are successful and the path can be riddled with landmines; this can stretch out even further.

With that said business users need better access to data today, hence the reason why BI is so hot. If they need access today, but it will take a minimum of 18 months to get it to them, what can be done?

A lot of our customers that corporately are going down the path of a long-term, large scale initiative are looking to best-of-breed, single focus applications that are less complex and easier to deploy and maintain for their short-term needs.

A good example would be the following:

ABC Company has decided to purchase and roll out a large BI platform from XYZ Company. The goal is to pull the data from multiple systems and grant access to thousands of users across the company. The estimated cost for this roll out is $7,000,000 and will take roughly three years. IT will be heavily involved, as well as lots of consultants from both the vendor and an outside consulting firm.

The ultimate goal is to sunset the short-term asset when the enterprise tool is rolled out, but there also may be an opportunity to integrate this tool as well.

This is a good example of how having a short-term and long-term technology portfolio mindset could gain both long-term strategic value as well as short-term immediate business need.

Dave Ferguson, iDashboards