I love a good graph or even a good table. A compelling infographic can totally distract me from what I’m doing. And a good dashboard—nirvana. (Data geek—yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.)
But when it comes to your business dashboards, you don’t want dashboards that distract people. You want a dashboard that gives you the facts you need to run your business at a glance. You want measures that reflect the real status of meaningful variables that are under your control. You want instant clarity. And you want to be able to drill down to details quickly if you see something that looks out of whack.
Here’s an example dashboard that was created for a CEO using BIO from BIO Analytics Corp.
It contains KPIs, current balances for key accounts, trend analyses, and an alert report for the activity for the top ten customers. The CEO (let’s say his name is Tom Burns) can filter on a specific department or time period and all of the graphs will change to reflect that selection. Tom can drill down—all the way to the transaction level—so he can get quick answers without waiting for someone else to look it up. He can change the columns or the rows with just a click, and if he likes his new analysis, he can save it so he doesn’t have to recreate it tomorrow or next week or next month. Further, Tom can distribute his analysis along with any questions or comments to his entire crew via the web or PowerPoint or SharePoint—any distribution method that can use a web part. Now that’s a great dashboard and it’s easy to create from your existing Microsoft Dynamics data and data from other sources within your organization using BIO.
Need some tips on creating dashboards? I found this site this morning called that might interest you. It’s not product- or vendor-specific and it is chock full of tips from experts, many of whom are consultants and not affiliated with any product. Although we’re not on it yet, there’s lots of good information to help you get started.
Join BIO for a to get to see how BIO business intelligence software can help you meet your dashboard needs. And please contact me at 203.705.4648 or by email at sandi@bio4analytics.com if you have any questions about BIO or business intelligence in general.
By Sandi Forman of BIO Analytics, Corp.,
I like the idea of this dashboard for an executive of the company. An executive needs a rundown of the numbers and important indicators. They don't need to see all the work that goes into these numbers on their dashboard. They just need an easy to read page of the numbers.