Building Dashboards? 3 Pitfalls to Avoid
June 2008 - Volume 1, Issue 1
Dashboard functionality has been available in business intelligence technology since the turn of the century. Many organizations have leveraged these easy-to-use technologies to reach wider user communities who require a custom, one-stop information source. While some limited interactivity has been available via these dashboards, real investigative analytics have been kept in the hands of the organization's power users and delivered using more traditional tabular reporting and Microsoft Excel.
More recently, business intelligence tools have succeeded in embedding advanced, interactive web visualization technologies into their dashboard offerings. Still easy to use, interactive dashboards are opening up the world of investigative analytics to a larger community of users. Custom views of information can now easily be linked and expanded providing opportunity to use this interactivity to embed analytics into the analysis and decision-making workflow processes.
With all of this potential, why are so many companies still struggling to achieve their promised value? As with many business intelligence applications, the problem rarely owes to shortcomings or defects in the technology. While each of the business intelligence technologies comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, it's rare that they are incapable of meeting the users' needs based on technology limitations. Similarly, while technology implementation teams also come with their own strengths and weaknesses, their challenges in building an application can generally be overcome with a combination of input from experts and training on the technology platforms.
The problem falls to the requirements gathering process. Great advances in technology have not been equaled with great advances in the ability of project teams to take solid technical requirements. Absent specialized dashboard experts, the responsibility for gathering requirements either falls to the technology team which has a more limited understanding of the custom views and workflow necessary for decision making, or to the business decision makers, who have a limited understanding of the full capabilities of the new technology.
Without successful requirements, it is impossible to create a solid technical design. And without a strong technical design, shortcomings of the technology or of the implementation team become magnified and often cannot be overcome.
While requirements gathering problems come in all shapes in sizes, Southport has found three common areas where the process is likely to break down. Awareness of these potential pitfalls can mean the difference between a project that delivers real business value and one that is a headache for all concerned.
1. The Custom View -- Technology development teams tend drive dashboard requirements towards advanced tool functionality and data breadth. End-users drive requirements towards advanced graphics. To succeed, the technology team must focus end-users on how they identify potential business problems and ensure that dashboard views facilitate this identification.
2. The Process -- Development teams tend to focus requirements towards data analytics (e.g., drilling and report manipulations). End users struggle to trust the solution and want immediate access to all of the data to export into Excel. The technology team needs to get the business to focus on how they investigate problems once identified and use the interactivity of the dashboard to mirror this investigation process.
3. The Answer -- With a larger body of enterprise information comes more opportunity to misunderstand results due to inconsistent presentation of the data. The technology team needs to focus the users on aligning their understanding of the data and ensure consistent presentation.
Given the investment already made in ensuring these parts work together successfully, organizations can't afford to let flawed dashboard requirements lead to a failed project. Any of these problems can cause delays, additional expenses, and even complete failure of the project to deliver value. To build a dashboard solution that delivers real business value, focus on getting the requirements right. Start by bringing together your business and technical teams and make sure they educate and ask the right questions of each other. When your technology team understands how your business users will apply and integrate the solution into their workflow, and your business users have an understanding of the capabilities that technology can provide, you are ready to start building your dashboards.
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Southport Services Group, LLC is a management and IT consulting company specializing in enterprise business intelligence. We offer a full-range of consulting services that help our customers design, develop and deploy business intelligence solutions that convert data into actionable information. BI KnbowledgeShare is a free newsletter that is published monthly. |
