Mark Flaherty (MF): Start by understanding what you really need to be looking at, because the speedometers, thermometers, and gauges are just a bunch of green lights or red lights, et cetera, and they don’t mean much at all if you don’t have the context around them.
It starts with the selection of the right KPIs to watch and ensuring the data is there to calculate them and report on them in a timely fashion. I think there is such a thing is too many green lights. For instance, you might be killing your sales goals for your next quarter, because you are cramming all your sales upfront.
So you need a lot more conceptual understanding to keep from jumping to the wrong conclusion. You need to include other metrics that give you the whole picture.
Can you explain drill-down capabilities and why you want them in your dashboards?
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The real power of a good dashboard comes when you start to think that “All right. I don’t necessarily need to report on the decision I have already made. I actually want to be informed when the condition is met that caused me to make that decision.” The opportunity is to put analysis in the context of the business process. Understanding how that business process is laid out, in general, it’s the most important thing. Then you make sure that the data is in such a format that it can be summarized. From a high level you then need to be able to drill down to the specific customer action or account opportunity, whatever it might be. You’re trying to reach the level where you can actually be able to influence that outcome. So there are many different layers you need to put together, and think about the person who is talking to the customer, what decisions can or cannot be made.
You can have many different feeds, even external data feeds. There’s no reason you can’t use data from an operational application, see your customer and then have the context of analysis there, too. There’s also no reason you can’t start with the high level view of your organization, how you are performing and be able to drill down to the specific customer or service you ask for, or opportunity, and then instantly click through to your operational application, where you can call, or start the service you want, whatever it might be, to be able to take action then and there.
You should be able to blur the boundaries. The technology is certainly here. When you get down to the granular level you are dealing with small volume of data anyway, so accessing your operational system directly is not a technical problem. It’s only an issue when you trying to aggregate large volumes of data. Then you cannot go against operational data stores since it can cause performance problems.