The main objective of a dashboard is to provide actionable insights for decision-makers and people embedded in key processes. The best dashboards are simple, well-structured, and easily consumed by people with different levels of expertise,
The most common mistake in the use of dashboards today is overcomplication and misalignment with the strategic or business goals of the company.
The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures.
Ben Shneiderman, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
In my practice, I help companies create a hierarchy of metrics with the use of dashboards that are aligned with the business objectives and clearly communicate the most important aspect of the metric.
My experience in KPI development, strategic planning, and business intelligence spans over 30 years.
Operations and Maintenance at Zeal had gone from bad to worse. Zeal’s performance had gone so bad that both regulators and investors demanded that the Board of Directors took a more direct role in the daily running of the company.
I was a member of a Process Improvement team trained in root cause analysis, change management, and regulatory audits. As a business analyst, I was also experienced in financial processes and workflow documentation. We had just successfully completed another turn-around project and were dispatched to Zeal’s most affected production center.
The first step was to understand the current situation. We reviewed the metric boards in meeting rooms, weekly and monthly reports, and executive debriefs. What struck us immediately was the high proliferation of metrics. One of the ways Zeal’s leadership team had elected to get a handle on the situation was to measure and display every metric possible. Each department within Zeal created its own set and “contributed” to the master report given to the COO in separate tabs, with different levels of detail, and with vastly different ways to display the data.
This was more than 30 years ago. Dashboards were a collection of charts, graphs, and tables printed and published either on boards or collected into binders that managers carried as references. Zeal’s binder had over 300 elements to describe the performance of 6 departments. A large group of people was assigned the job of collecting, producing, and publishing these elements on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
Nowadays, the same job requires able programming and integration between applications. Powerful and clever Business Intelligence applications like Power BI, Tableau, or even Smartsheet can take lots of data collected at any required frequency and display the analyst visualization of the data on your mobile device and on demand.
Bottom line: the fundamental problem with overanalyzed, overcomplicated, and unorganized data reporting that I saw in Zeal so long ago has the potential to be done in a far worse magnitude today.
“Just because it is relatively easy to display every single indicator on a screen, it doesn’t mean you should. Less in more in the world of data visualization”
Francisco A. Barillas, Principal Vectoral Data
Whereas Zeal in the past had to work hard to inundate itself with data that said little, companies today have an array of easily programmable applications to do the same if they are not careful. Most of my work in this arena is helping customers design dashboards that enable decision-making, understanding of what is going right or wrong, and provoking insightful conversations across departments.
