3 Types of Business Dashboards. 3 Benefits of Business Performance Management Dashboards. Automate and Analyze Business Methodologies, Metrics, Processes and Systems that drive Business Performance

May 23, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: Balanced Scorecard 

Business Performance Management is a framework for organizing, automating and analyzing business methodologies, metrics, processes and systems that drive business performance. In other words, business performance management (BPM or Corporate Performance Management, Enterprise performance management, or Operational performance management) is a set of processes that helps organizations optimize their business performance.

Most people agree that the area of BI includes the following processes and related technologies:
Budgeting
Forecasting
Reporting
Strategic planning
Scorecarding
Analysis
Dashboarding
Data mining
Data warehousing

Dashboard solutions now come with all kinds of content and with almost any type of graphics for all types of users. One of the main goals of this chapter is to provide key criteria to help you determine the right type of dashboard for each of your various decision makers.
There are, of course, numerous ways people define and categorize dashboards. We have organized these into three principal types:
1. Strategic dashboards , which support organizational alignment with strategic goals
2. Tactical dashboards , which support the measuring of progress in key projects or initiatives
3. Operational dashboards, which support the monitoring of specific business activities

Before examining each category in more detail, let us consider how the three dashboard types relate to the people in the organization. A good way to do this is to extrapolate the dashboard categories on top of a chart that portrays each person’s level of responsibility and their time devoted to analyzing data. Although it is not always true for all positions, it is likely that lower – level positions at the operational level of an organization with less overall responsibility have less time available for analysis. Senior executive – level positions at an organization spend more time on tactical issues but also have less time for detailed analysis. In between the two are the mid – level managers who are often involved with both tactical and operational issues. Many of them are assigned analysis and reporting tasks that encompass both areas, and that consumes a great deal of their time.

STRATEGIC DASHBOARDS
By using strategic dashboards, an organization can monitor progress toward strategic objectives. An executive – level dashboard might reflect enterprise – wide strategic goals and corresponding key performance indicators (KPIs).
Enterprise – wide strategic dashboards often “ cascade ” down to the department level, while retaining alignment to the corporate objectives. Working down from the global to the departmental level helps avoid creating isolated departmental dashboards. Strategic dashboards are typically highly summarized, highly graphical, less frequently updated, and include global, external, trend, and growth measures.
Strategic dashboards are often related to or based on the balanced scorecard methodology of David Norton and Robert Kaplan, 1 which provides a method for determining and achieving organizational goals.

TACTICAL DASHBOARDS
Organizations use tactical dashboards to monitor progress and related trends for each of their strategic initiatives. This can include key projects, and both the initiatives and the projects are quite often measured against a preset goal (e.g., a budget or a target). Because tactical dashboards can be focused, they are ideally deployed with a technology that allows for drill down to detail and “ slicing and dicing ” the data — for example, to analyze why certain targets are not being met and where the problem is occurring.
As data warehouse and dashboard technologies become easier, faster, and cheaper to deploy, companies and governmental organizations can be expected to make increasing use of tactical dashboards to help internal and external stakeholders monitor progress on important initiatives.

OPERATIONAL DASHBOARDS
This category includes dashboards used to monitor business processes, business activities, and complex events. Usually, the display will provide daily or weekly updates or near real – time charts and reports that illustrate the status of business or manufacturing processes. Because managers use the dashboards frequently, they can discover issues and take action to fix problems or take advantage of opportunities. Because of the practical nature of operational dashboards, they are most typically used at the departmental level (where “ operations take place ” ) and not at the senior executive level. Senior executives would typically use a tactical or strategic dashboard to monitor just a point – in – time aggregate metric or two from each operational dashboard.
Similar to tactical dashboards, the narrow scope (sales, help desk services, etc.) of operational dashboards dictates more detailed information with strong analytical functionality to perform root – cause analysis on the displayed data.
Given limited space (sometimes referred to as real estate) available on a single dashboard screen, and, as discussed previously, the fact that managers at different levels in the organization are looking for dashboards tailored to their responsibilities, it is clear that organizations that are serious about dashboarding will design layouts tailored to the needs of their target users.

Here is a list of some typical benefits of dashboards:
Improved decision making and performance:
Ability to easily identify and correct negative trends
Ability to make better informed decisions based on collected BI
Ability to measure the organization’s efficiencies and inefficiencies
Ability to perform improved analysis through visual presentation of performance measures
Ability to align strategies and organizational goals

Employee efficiency gains:
Increased productivity
Saving time by eliminating the need for multiple reports
Reducing the need to create and maintain large numbers of static reports
Low training requirements, and easy to learn

Employee motivation:
Users can generate detailed reports showing new trends.
More time can be spent analyzing data and less time spent finding, compiling, and formatting data.
Well – designed dashboards are more interesting than most “ old fashioned ” tabular reports.
Dashboards provide a means for sharing strategies, tactics, and operational data that empower employees

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