Guided by Dashboards

The key to performance dashboard success is making sure the right indicators are chosen, Vernon says. “The executives have to decide, ‘What business are we in, and what is critical to our business?’” he says. “They need to list, in order, a finite number of things to track. Ten is probably too many, and seven is a lot. I would say you should have five to seven key things you can glance at to get a picture of where you’re going and where you are today.”

Dan Wisniewski, vice president and managing director for IT consulting firm Fujitsu Consulting in Minnetonka, calls these factors key performance indicators. “You need to keep it at a high enough level so that you are not trying to manage every detail,” Wisniewski says. “The question should be, ‘Do I have a problem with my inventory?’ rather than ‘Which specific order has not come in yet?’”

Wisniewski says executives may need to monitor specific order details as well, and that can be accomplished by drilling down from a dashboard into a data store or, alternatively, by creating a separate dashboard to track order-specific information. However, limiting dashboard elements to high-level information keeps the screen from being too cluttered and avoids executives getting lost in too many details, Wisniewski notes.

Getting a Clear Picture

A good dashboard is only as good as the data it draws from and represents. The best dashboards are tied directly into data stores or data warehouses that are comprehensive, accurate, and continually updated. “You need a full data-to-dashboard strategy,” says John Woodburn, president of The Woodburn Group, a technology consulting firm in St. Louis Park. He relates the story of a medical organization whose CEO had seen a presentation on dashboards, liked what he saw, and immediately ran out and bought a few dashboard tools and instructed his IT staff to build something like what he had seen. Six months later, Woodburn says, the project had still not gotten off the ground because the company had failed to take the time to accurately define the data needed to feed the dashboard. “You need a data quality strategy, data integrity rules, and security structures,” Woodburn says.

“The number one thing that is going to determine whether a dashboard will thrive or languish is the data that is underneath it,” says Timothy Brands, president of iBusiness Solutions in Bloomington, a provider of data warehousing services and performance management dashboards. “The second most important thing is that it has to have executive sponsorship. Our most wildly successful projects in dashboarding have the highest-level-possible sponsorship.”

That high-level sponsorship, Brands notes, can turn a dashboard from a corporate instrument panel to something that does more: a tool that helps align corporate goals and strategy. “If the executive committee is looking at the same metrics as management, and management is looking at information that is fed up from operations, that creates alignment and accountability throughout the organization,” Brands says.