How Do You Manage the Fact That Different People Will Need Different Versions of a Single Dashboard, Different Access to Data?

This is a continuation of a transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft entitled "Designing a Good Dashboard." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): This is extremely common. An operational person on the front line will need to see a certain granularity of data, and then his manager wants to see what he is doing. His manager wants to see what all the employees are doing. Can you make one dashboard that handles all of these needs or do they end up being discrete?

In some cases, it is best if they are discrete. You definitely have your general dashboard that many different types of people will use. But for the dashboard to be really effective, you really need to give capabilities focused on the individual person or at least role.

Do you need to take into account different skill levels for dashboard users?

That’s a pretty tough question. Yes, it can depend on the end user that actually will be using the dashboard. You may need to tailor the dashboard to their particular skill set. For example, for many business users, you probably want to keep it simple. But for the line manager working in a manufacturing company, you might want to have more information at their finger tips because that is what they are used to. So in general, I would say that the concept of a general layout doesn’t really work. You really need a dashboard designed for specific roles and sometimes for a specific person.

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You definitely try to generalize to specific audiences when you can, but for some of the most effective dashboards, it has to be made to work for a particular person. But if you think about data mashup, this is a very powerful concept where users can pick and choose which visualizations or which KPI matter to them, and now they can just create their own dashboard on the fly. That kind of self-service BI is very powerful.

Going back to the senior executive, they are usually more interested in the scorecard type of dashboard. They want to see where they are standing on the major goals in their organization, performance management, essentially. But for somebody who working in the daily operations, they probably want to see more details, see more trends, things like that.

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