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.

Business Intelligence - Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

Every where you look now Enterprise performance management (EPM) has a new definition or product. I consider Enterprise Performance Mangement to be a strategic approach to improving business performance. Gartner has defined EPM as

the methodologies, metrics, processes, and systems used to monitor and manage the business performance of an enterprise.

EPM in represents the strategic deployment of business intelligence solutions.

Whether you need help with a number of major BI players including Oracle and Business Objects have a tool set that can help with:

• CRM Analytics


• Financial Analytics


• Industry Analytics


• Supply Chain Analytics


• Workforce Analytics

Methodologies
Using a methodology to implement EPM significantly improves the chances for sucess. It gives companies a top down framework by which to align planning and execution, strategy and tactics, and business unit and enterprise objectives. Some of these are six sigma, balanced scorecard, activity-based costing, total quality management, economic value-add, and integrated strategic measurement. The balanced scorecard is the most widely adopted performance management methodology. Methodologies on their own cannot deliver a full solution to an enterprise's CPM needs. Many pure methodology implementations fail to deliver the anticipated benefits because they are not integrated with the fundamental CPM processes.

Key Performance Indicators and Metrics
Metrics and Key performance Indicators (KPI’s) are critical in prioritization what has to be measured. The methodology used helps in determining the metrics to be used by the organization. It is frequently said that one cannot manage what cannot be measured. Identifying the key metrics and determining how they are to be measured helps the organizations to monitor performance across the board without getting deluged by a surfeit of data; a scenario plaguing most companies today.

Dashboards and scorecards
Business has today evolved from the age when Business Intelligence would take days or weeks to provide key organizational data requested by the senior managers. Up to the minute data, coupled with alerts and drill down facilities to locate the reasons for disruptions has empowered managers today. These solutions are integrated with the existing enterprise wide solutions thus augmenting the systems already in place.

Business Intelligence - Dashboard Design Seminar (Stephen Few)

On Friday 5th October, Stephen Few presented his seminar – “Analysing and presenting business data.”

Over the last decade there has been an explosion in data available but most people and organisations have a problem presenting the data. "When dashboards work, they provide a powerful means to tame the beast of data overload. Despite their popularity, however, most dashboards live up to only a fraction of their potential."

Often people obscure the numbers by the way it is presented. Edward Tufte a pioneer in the field of visual communication of information coined the term "chartjunk" to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of quantitative information displays.

When a dashboard is properly designed, it can provide a powerful way to monitor what is going on at a glance. Two characteristics of a dashboard are largely responsible for this ability:
a) their visual nature and
b) the way they integrate everything you must keep track of, however disparate, onto a single screen

Recommendations:
• Do not use pie charts - a bar chart presents the information in a more precise format - see his blog post "Save the Pies for desert".
• Try to avoid visual lies when using a bar chart - start the values at 0.
• 3D graphs are usually not a good choice for business communication. Adding a 3rd dimension adds no extra meaning (and often obfuscates some of the data).
• When showing changes in time - a line graph is often the best choice
• It is OK to use tables of data when you need your audience needs to look up a value or to think.
• Using Excel 2007 data bars are a good visual queue but do not include text over the bars (put it on the side)
The diagram below called a bullet graph was designed by Stephen Few to present a compact, data-rich, and efficient alternative to gauges on a dashboard. Below is an example of a bullet graph with labelled parts.

When creating a dashboard the design should always consider providing quantitative scales so that the qualitative judgments of the data.

The use of colour on dashboards
Did you know that 10% of men and 1% of women are colour blind, and most of them cannot distinguish green from red. On many dashboards you see the traffic lights (green, amber, red) to represent how a particular metric is performing. To someone that is colour blind this looks like (brown, amber, brown). Additionally, colour coding is often overused; this undermines the ability to function effectively. When a designer over uses colour in a dashboard, they do so with the best of intentions. "Colour coding everything, they will make the display easier to comprehend as a whole". Unfortunately, when everything stands out, nothing does.
A common design flaw often seen is a bar chart with 10 to 20 items all with different colours. Using excel has made it very easy to select a set of data and create a graph. Often the series takes up more space than the actual graph.

Edward Tufte also coined the term "Sparkline" for the line chart that displays trends (i.e. no axes or values). This can be a very powerful tool for displaying a metrics behaviour or trend over time.

Stephen Few concluded his seminar with the slide ...

“Eloquence through Simplicity"



Stephen has written a number of white papers and a book on the design of dashboards titled – Information Dashboard Design.

Aleron utilises many of the ideas and recommendations made by Stephen Few, Edward Tufte and other visual design specialists.
For more information contact Jason McIntyre – jason.mcintyre@aleron.com.au.