I’m quite excited because we are currently reviewing some designs for an executive dashboard. Now that we finally have lots of beautiful dimensionally modelled data in our warehouse with periodic snapshots going back almost 3 years, we are actually at a point where we can present some of it together in a highly aggregated manner to hopefully inform, influence and improve strategic decision making at our institution.
I first used the above slide back in 2007 at the Cognos Asia-Pacific Forum to remind people that dashboards are the veneer of a BI/DW platform. You simply cannot sustain an integrated dashboard without the underlying atomic data and that data takes a long time to get. The quote I read at the time still stands:
“…the worst case theme is often called a scorecard or executive dashboard. This deceptively simple application draws on data from almost all business processes in the organisation. You can’t create the entire dashboard until you’ve built the whole warehouse foundation. Or worse you end up building the dashboard by hand every day, manually extracting, copying, and pasting data from all those sources to make it work. It can be difficult to get business folks to understand the magnitude of the effort involved in creating this ’simple’ report.” Ralph Kimball
So now that we have the data, you might think it relatively easy to create that dashboard, the one that people have been clamoring for since we started this wonderful process…
There are, it seems, an endless stream of people proclaiming what wonderful dashboards they have in their organisations but yet when you look a little more closely they often appear to be a disjointed jumble of content thrown together like one of those fuzzy felt pictures you used to play with at pre-school - lots of bright distracting pictures pointing all over the place, sort of related and sort of telling you an overall story, but then again not really. They catch the attention for a few seconds and then, purpose served, their time is done.
It seems odd that this situation prevails, I wonder why that might be. It certainly isn’t helped by the major vendors in the BI space who seem to believe that their purpose is to appeal to the fuzzy felt designers.
Working in BI/DW in higher education clearly means we all like a challenge and this is up there with the best I’ve had cause to think about recently. How to effectively map the major processes of a university on a single screen, in an enduring manner, and in a way that simply and rapidly communicates an overall situation. I’ll keep you posted…
Perhaps executives feel that their jobs would be made infinitely easier - that the answers to all of life’s questions will be laid out before them - by the mythical Executive Dashboard. That certainly goes some way to explaining why there is a perceived need for a dashboard ‘now’, and also why, once delivered, there’s been very little thought gone into the overall story (flashy veneer aside). Done properly, I suspect designing a simple, elegant yet information-rich dashboard is a very tricky thing to pull off…
Just Glitzy??? I don’t think so. Even if the dashboards are just flashy they are time savers compared to running individual reports. Even if we are in the beginning stage of dashboard adoption, flashy stuff is good for more adoption and awareness. Refinement and iterations will lead to more actionable and meaningful dashboards.