InetSoft BI Webcast: What is the Process for Building a KPI Dashboard?

Below is a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft in July 2010 on the topic of Best Practices for Key Performance Indicators. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, Vice President of Marketing at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): You should start with a top-down approach, work with senior management to find out what they think the key performance indicators are. “Key” is important in order to come up with a finite number of truly important metrics. Eight to 10 is usually the right number. They should be chosen because the reflect “Performance,” and they are the ones that employees can affect with their actions and decisions.

Once you have those, that will germinate the development of deeper level KPIs at the operational and departmental levels. You can then break those measures out and rank them on a couple of criteria. First which are the most important for getting the results they need to get? Second, you have to determine what is collectible. A lot of times companies start out having already a third of their desired KPIs being measured and monitored.

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Then another third are sitting around here somewhere. They are in some operational databases that are not necessarily that easy to get to. But you can point your BI software at them, and you can get them. And then there is the final third, the data that you don’t collect, yet. So a big part of figuring out what measures you will settle on is determining which are the metrics that can be gotten that support the company’s goals and objectives.

Once you’ve done that identified that list of metrics, and you’ve got your performance management or KPI dashboard software installed, now you link up those metrics to scorecards and dashboards. Use the automated tools and ETL processes to get the data in databases if they are not already. A lot of times you might find that the second category of KPIs have been tracked in personal spreadsheets, so you’ll need some capability to get that data into the BI platform.

And you should get those KPI dashboards out the door first.

 

InetSoft Viewpoint

"The open standards aspect is very important to us since it allows our customers to integrate our technology more easily and leverage assets they already have, in terms of hardware and software and IT skills. So based on this BI platform, our software delivers a host of front-end BI tools including visualization tools, enterprise reporting, monitoring dashboards, and analysis. Those functions were based on a very powerful patent-pending technology we call Data Block. This Data Block technology is really made up of a back-end data mashup engine and a caching middle layer. There is a front-end we call the worksheet, which is a Web-based, spreadsheet-like user interface that a power user can easily use to combine and transform data blocks. The data blocks are typically started at the atomic data block level. That is typically created by an IT or a BI specialist. They choose these data blocks and performance tune those data blocks. Then the power users can use those building blocks to build more complex, but more useful structures for answering the questions they have on hand. And all the data blocks you build, in turn become building blocks themselves. You can build on this architecture, building very sophisticated structures which you can use to answer a wide range of unanticipatible questions. " - Luke Liang, CEO, InetSoft

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Previous: Dashboard for Executive and Operational KPIs

Next: Final Third of KPIs

More Resources:

		Key Performance Indicators - Using InetSoft's Software
		Effective Use of KPI Dashboards
		What HR Key Performance Indicators to Track?
		Selecting Key Performance Measures