Enterprise dashboards

Hello, my name is Shadan Malik. I'm the president and CEO of iDashboards. Today we are here to talk about the subject of enterprise dashboards.

Dashboards are all the buzz today, because they are fundamentally changing how we look at information, how we access information, and also how it affects our decision making. Traditionally, we have had these spreadsheets and reports with lots of rows and columns of data. The challenge being they are data rich, but information poor. That's where enter dashboards. So today we are going to examine the subject with four basic questions: what, who, how, and why.

First, what is a dashboard? The term obviously comes from the automotive dashboards, where user can get to all the key pieces of information to drive a vehicle. In the same sense an enterprise dashboard is a collection of powerful visual elements such as bar charts, speedometers, maps, trend-lines. They all at a quick glance tell the user what are the key performance indicators and metrics.

As a result it helps in better analysis, better tracking of information, proactive alerting, so when a certain key performance indicator exceeds a threshold, a user is notified through emails or visual alerts that there's a problem.

The next is a drill-down. So when I see a problem, I have the ability to get to the root cause analysis: where the problem happened, what caused the problem, when it was triggered.

Now, who is using dashboards? It has the widest spectrum of applications obviously.

Let's start with manufacturing, just take a few examples. Manufacturing organizations may be using it for supply chain, logistics, quality control, heath care. A hospital for example may be using it for monitoring patient satisfaction, or quality of care, and the performance of physicians and nurses.

Financial institutions like banks and credit unions. They may be using it to monitor loans and mortgages. Government. They could be using, for example, in the local context, a county government is using it to monitor prison population, cost, and budgets. So as you can see the applications are all across the board.

That brings us to the next question: how? You can start from one side of the spectrum and go to the other extreme. On the lower end, you have lower cost solutions such as charting tools, or you can call it charting widgets. The challenge here is it takes a long time to implement. Often it needs a lot of programming resources to put together a solution around this.

On the other extreme you have the BI dashboard platforms. They are expensive, but they provide robust security, a user framework that has personalization, customization, and all that. In between, you have a happy medium of niche players that provide a good dashboarding solution without a very expensive cost.

So that brings us to the point: why should enterprise implement dashboards, what are the benefits? First it improves accountability across the organization. It helps improve transparency within the organization. When we have better accountability and transparency, it also improves the compliance. And last but not the least, you have a better decision making across the organization.

So in closing, enterprise dashboards are truly helping to bring business intelligence to the masses.