InetSoft Webinar: How to Pick the Right Key Performance Indicators

This is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Building a Winning Dashboard" The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, sales engineer at InetSoft.

We can pick many key indicators, but the ones that are really the most critical ones and the ones that really matter are the key performance indicators you personally actually target. So you want to target specific people, and you want to do that by interviewing people, and you want it not by trying to wear the hat of a consultant or an IT guy or an MBA.

Maybe you just want to pretend you are kind of investigative journalist. It's very easy in this project to get lost in technology and requirements documents, and often even having done charts, being people, we forget that intelligence, business intelligence is not achieved when data is collected and stored and/or thrown up on a dashboard, but when the data is understood by humans.

Now, the next point is that you want to make sure that the dashboard is more relevant by giving people choice, and how do you do that? When we created our BI visualization application, we really emphasized the importance of letting people choose what they see on their home screen or even on their specific dashboard, so in InetSoft's application, some of our clients have 100s of dashboards and metrics. We only decided to summarize all those dashboards in tiles and allow our users to build their own custom home screen that contains different tiles.

Read how InetSoft was rated as a top BI vendor in G2 Crowd's user survey-based index.

This allows them to very quickly navigate to the right dashboard they want to go to. We also built an option that allows users to modify the dashboard that some one else created and then change that to their own specific design. That could be, maybe a style change. It could maybe be a different metrics combination or selection that they want to use on the dashboard.

Here's an example of such a personalizable dashboard, where I have that option on the menu to basically copy this dashboard for my own analysis, and that basically allows me to take that dashboard into my own private sandbox and then modify to my own specific requirements and then share it back with other users, potentially.

So I am giving people choice by doing that, and what that means is that employees really now have a new level of empowerment. Instead of guessing how they are doing, and what metrics they want to care about or go to look at, they can really customize and control them, themselves.

It gives them a whole new level of self-sufficiency, and for IT and reporting, it also means that they can free up precious resources and time by reducing ad hoc quests. Instead they can focus may be on being able to create new capabilities versus pulling data out or generating new reports for other colleagues.

So you want to use that employee empowerment, you want to give those self sufficient capabilities and reduce the ad hoc requests to IT. That way you can make sure dashboards are relevant by always starting, focusing on the right people and then augmenting the power by giving them the ability to choose.