Business Intelligence - Scorecards and Dashboards

Understanding the true performance of your business and its progress against the corporate strategy is not an easy task. Enterprise performance allows you to track the performance of your company or division against KPI or metrics - dashboards and scorecards can help.

A scorecard is a concept for measuring whether the activities of a company are meeting its objectives in terms of vision and strategy.

A dashboard being a set of indicators about the state of a process, piece of equipment, or business metric such as cash on hand or YTD sales at a specific point in time.

This and subsequent posts will looks into the best way to view your business for making the right decisions.

A scorecard could include some of the following metrics:

• (Marketing) Customer registration times
• (Marketing) Visitor WEB site bounce rates
• (Sales) Percentage of sales on first contact
• (Operations) Stock deliveries
• (Marketing) Frequency of potential customer contact
• (HR) Review ratings
• (Sales) Call centre sales

The author of this diagram is the Balanced Scorecard Institute

A dashboard can include some of the following metrics:

• Number of inbound calls in queue
• (Sales) Sales growth
• (Operations) Stock on hand
• (Marketing) WEB site enquiries
• (Sales) Sales by state this month
• (IT) Average Call Resolution Time
• (HR) Staff Turnover
  

This dashboard is available online and seen here.

Using a combination of both dashboards and scorecards will provide a holistic picture of your business. This set of tools has the potential to highlight a number of facets of your business that you do not know!

Dashboards are often a better choice for metrics that operate in minutes or hours.

Scorecards tend to be better used with metrics that are usually reviewed over a longer time period ie weeks or months.

Note: Aleron has designed and implemented visualisation scorecards and dashboards for a number of large and medium companies.

Google to acquire Motorola ?

I read an interesting post on the activities of Google in the mobile phone space.

Do you know about Android, open access, 700MHz and a gPhone?



Do you know that Google acquired Jaiku - something that Nokia was rumoured to be after. Google acquired the popular “activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones.” Google has made a number of acquisitions in the mobile and VoIP space.


Android is an Open Handset Alliance Project. The Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, is developing Android: the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. To help developers get started developing new applications, we're offering an early look at the Android Software Development Kit.

Archart made the comment:

Here’s the thesis: If Google is prepared to go as far as Android, why not go the next step and produce its own handsets? Not just a single ‘gPhone’ but entire portfolios of Android-enabled devices.

Nokia is a company that produces a range of handsets, a handset OS, a rich set of mobile applications and services. Why not Google ? Nokia has spent $10 billion trying to compete with Google in search, email, file sharing, advertising and mapping (e.g. Enpocket, Intellisync, Avvenu and NAVTEQ).

Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz discuss the availability of the SDK, that it will be open source in the future, and demo some applications.

Techcrunch have a great posted predicting what the next set of companies Google will acquire in 2008. Another interesting post about Google strategy is WEB 3.0 and Google.

Aussie Raymond Crowe performs his amazing shadow puppetry

I saw this show on the Christmas episode of Spicks & Specks - then it popped up in an email from a friend and now its in the news.



This is a great show and now he is doing the rounds on major shows in the US including Ellen.

My favourites include:

• the babies hand reaching up


• the rabbit


• the swan

This video on youtube already has the following honours:
Honors for This Video:

• #17 - Most Discussed (All Time) - Travel & Events - Australia


• #12 - Most Linked (All Time) - Travel & Events - Australia


• #2 - Most Viewed (All Time) - Travel & Events - Australia


• #2 - Top Favorites (All Time) - Travel & Events - Australia


• #31 - Top Favorites (All Time) - Travel & Events


• #3 - Top Rated (All Time) - Travel & Events - Australia


• #84 - Top Rated (All Time) - Travel & Events

Best of CSS Design 2007

Smashing design and WEB Designer wall have unleashed the best of CSS Design for 2007.

Some of my favourites include:

Scrapblog
A beautiful web-app frontpage.





Larissa Meek
A beautiful blog design by Larissa Meek, formerly a model, now she is an art director at AgencyNet.




Veerle’s Blog
Another classic beautiful blog - I previously commented on Veerle's designs here.

Zune Commercial Experiments

Below are some of the latest Zune commercials from Microsoft ... the latest in their Social TV experiment. I have viewed this four times similar to the guys at Techcrunch now. I love the commercial but I agree that it could be ...

Lewis Carroll-esque fantasy of someone on an acid trip

.





One comment from TechCrunch ...

i dont know about you guys, but i think this is great. i dont know, i think that’s because im a commercial director/graphic designer. haha. IMHO i find zune’s ad/zune art way better than what apple does. although i have an ipod and a mac for a system, im really tempted to get a zune this xmas.

We have 4 ipods starting with a Generation 1 ipod through to the latest (RED) Ipod Nano. We are waiting for the Apple iphone ... so we avoided getting an ipod touch. Although I want another gadget cause the Zune looks cool - everything in our place is Apple so its now tough to justify any other brand.

SlideShare - Death by Microsoft Power Point

I visited SlideShare Link for the first time last month (can't remember how I found it), and I stumbled across this excellent presentation.

Two reasons why I think this is great:

• The slideshare technology is very cool
• The presentation is really appropriate

I attended a Microsoft Business Intelligence presentation after viewing this slideshow and common mistakes highlighted here appeared in a number of the Microsoft presentations.

View Upload your own

The great thing about this technology is it is fast and all presentations are indexed on their server - making it very easy to share your presentation with the world.