How Interoperable Or How Dynamic Are Dashboards?

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): It’s a big trend. A lot of people talk about it. I mean the reality is it’s still difficult to do with the traditional BI tools that have been out there. We see that with a lot of our customers where they are struggling with these old BI tools and accessing the data sources they have. They look for software like ours to solve these problems and really deliver on this self-service BI concept.

The technology is there to make this easier and easier. We were moving to the ability for savvy users to be able to gather information on the fly, to take advantage of apps that have been created for mash ups.

Are there any pitfalls to self-service BI?

Well, yes, it can become overwhelming if not organized properly. We have seen folks overwhelmed by too much data. You may find that you have 2,000 KPIs the company tracks, so you have two thousand different dimensions available in the design tool.

But that’s not what the true spirit of a KPI is. If you look everybody’s role in an organization, I guarantee you that we could get down to a handful that are relevant to each person or role. What are the key performance indicators that really matter to this person to get their job done?

And these KPIs have to be contextual. There has to be a very clear correlation between the number you see on the screen for an indicator and what the norm is, and then the actions to be taken for a given level. But so many people end up with such a huge amount of data that before you know it, there is no information hierarchy any more.

The whole nature of a dashboard is to be productive and to provide some kind of condensed single point of information that can really help steal your attention a little bit as you go through the day. There are educated folks, dedicated folks who need to analyze the data. But for dashboards, the primary goal is to provide the context necessary for the rest of the organization to make decisions. So we are really looking at the dashboards as a simplification of data processing.