Business Intelligence Dashboards : Are they all they're cracked up to be? Yes and No...!

Traditionally Business Intelligence is about numbers, charts and reports right? Big mainframe reporting systems using Focus or SAS, or even COBOL (those were the days, PIC S9(9) COMP-3, happy memories!!). Or early implementations of Microstrategy or Business Objects that looked good in their day, but seem out of place now.

The trend with technology companies for a few years now has been to make this front end graphical and 'fancy', and to sell the concept of a dashboard. Tools like Business Objects Excelsius and Microsoft Performance Point Server two examples of the leaders. One can't but help get the feeling though that technology has got ahead of the business requirements. Sure, we've all come to expect fancy graphics, but if these don't add any business value then what you end up with is 'gimmicky', 'fun' tools, that don't really add anything above charts and reams of numbers, or worse, deliver less. Charts after all did do the job for decades.

People like the dashboard concept because it promises summarised, easily understandable, relevant, actionable information. It's too easy though to under deliver on this promise. The idea that we can define rules that highlight exceptions, so that time spent analysing numbers is minimised and people are presented with the answer, is an attractive one but not one based on reality. 'Retail is Detail' so the saying goes and reading a retailers trading reports is not a simple business, if it was, buyers would have been replaced with Quants developing algorithms to manage the entire buy/supply process, and I'm not aware of any retailer doing this, or even remotely near it.

But let's not lose heart. That doesn't mean we can't get dashboards working. We need to concentrate on the business requirements and the business value and avoid the temptation to 'play' with technology. We can and should make the applications look good, processes like User Centred Design can add very significant value. Business Intelligence applications, along with email, are probably the only system that senior executives of companies actually use. As such they have visibility that's unrivalled from other IT areas and therefore why not make them a showcase of IT. Charts have their place and we need to play on their strengths and build in functionality that enhances them rather than supercedes them.

Too often the temptation with dashboards is to hide charts behind petrol gauges and sliders, why not have the chart of numbers as the centre piece and use it as the entry point into graphs, charts and deeper analysis.