Best Practices for Building Custom Executive Digital Dashboards

A digital dashboard is a collection of data visualization tools that provide the means to quickly get an overview of how an organization or a section of an organization is performing and the reasons behind its performance. A digital dashboard achieves this by allowing a user to monitor important business activities and processes that give insight into a company’s activities. One example of a tool used by dashboards is KPIs. KPIs, discussed more in section 3.3, give the user a very accurate idea of how a unit is performing without the user having to do deep analysis. KPIs are a fast and efficient way to deliver information, and are an integral part of a digital dashboard. In addition to providing quick analysis tools such as KPIs, dashboards allow the user to analyze the root causes of performance from many different perspectives. Once the root causes of performance are known, it is much easier for that organization or individual to act accordingly. In short, a digital dashboard is a tool that allows a user to quickly monitor and analyze an organization, division, group or individual’s performance.

Digital Dashboards are used in all industries including Manufacturing, Financial, Healthcare, Retail, Education and Energy. Each industry uses dashboards in different ways, but the overall purpose of a dashboard stays the same.

Figure 1: Financial Dashboard

 

Figure 2: Help Desk Dashboard

 

As you can see in Figures 1 and 2 above, the help desk dashboard looks very different from the financial dashboard; what may be useful for one industry may not be at all useful in another. That said every industry has some metrics that can benefit from a dashboard format and that can potentially make a company more efficient.

The goal of a digital dashboard is to provide actionable information based on past data which predicts future performance, allowing for effective decision-making. There are certainly other avenues of data analysis aside from dashboards which have the same goal, but the advantage of a dashboard is that it is easy to use, provides timely data and, most importantly, gives an idea as to how to go about implementing potential improvements and solutions.

Figure 3: Dashboard represented in Excel

 

In Figure 3 above, a typical dashboard created in Microsoft Excel is displayed. While this dashboard has most of the desired information displayed, it is not in a useful form. Figure 4 below is the same data represented in a .NET digital dashboard.

Figure 4: Dashboard represented in a .NET application

 

The dashboard in Figure 4 is more useful than the dashboard in Figure 3 because it displays information in an easier to absorb format. Furthermore, all information relating to sales and revenue is also readily available within the same application.

Consider the following scenario: Over the past several months a company has been engaged in strong marketing campaigns, and as such, revenue has increased. The supplied chart of this situation looks akin to Figure 5 below:

Figure 5: Simple chart of Revenue vs. Marketing

 

While this chart quickly identifies that the sales are doing well with increased marketing expenditures, it does not identify why. Where is the marketing money going, and what specifically has been increasing sales? The answer to these questions is not clear from this one chart, so more information is needed. Of course, there are means of finding this information and deciding what the best way to display it is, but a dashboard provides this data in an easy to read form with all relative information consolidated in one place. The decision of what is important has already been thought of, so you just need to look at the visualizations.

Figure 6: Example dashboard of Marketing Campaign

 

In Figure 6, after only a few moments of observation, it is obvious that web banners have obtained the highest marketing funding, and that nearly 30% of all visits to the companies’ webpage come from banner advisements. Furthermore, while ABC Coders has the highest hit rate, The Code House has the highest click-through rate. This information has been presented in multiple forms which best represent the data. These assortments of visualizations provide the advantage of clarity, something not easily achievable with other avenues of data analysis. Figure 6 both answers the questions raised by Figure 5 and provides a clear picture of the marketing campaign.

The ability of a dashboard to display different data in multiple forms is one of the main benefits of using a digital dashboard. The components used when creating a digital dashboard include charts, gauges, maps, diagrams, tables and scorecards. While the question of which tool to use for what type of data should be considered when developing a dashboard, digital dashboards provide the advantage of being able to dynamically change the data visualization on request so that data can be viewed from multiple perspectives.

A digital dashboard also has the advantage of having all different types of related data consolidated into one place. For example, in Figure 6 it would be very simple to add drill-down functionality to allow the user to click on a point within a chart and find out more information about the selected item. This kind of in-depth data analysis greatly assists the user in finding causes of performance anomalies. Adding this functionality to a dashboard is both easy to implement by the developer, and easy to use for the end user.

Best Practices are the guidelines for building digital dashboards that we believe result in a useful dashboard. While you can design a digital dashboard however you wish, the following practices result in a much more useful, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing dashboard. These practices are also extremely useful when starting the design process of a dashboard project.

Target User

The first and most important practice of building a dashboard is identifying who your target user is. A dashboard aimed at an executive of a company and one aimed at the marketing director are going to be very different. During the entire development process the end user should be kept in mind and the application tailored to this user. The tailoring process may include simple things such as placement of controls or data sources, but it can also include more complicated things such as the flow of the entire dashboard, or viewing secure data through a secure connection.

Right tool for the right job

A difficult requirement of building a digital dashboard is to decide what type of data visualization to use for different kinds of data. Generally, data should be displayed as follows:

·         Geographical data (i.e. Sales by Province in Canada) – Map

·         Data over time, ratio data, comparison of linear data – Chart

·         Snapshot data, single values (i.e. KPIs) – Gauge

·         Multidimensional data - OLAP

·         Other data – Diagram

Using this list should make it easy to break down any data into a group and display it with the appropriate data visualization tool. Further to this, making a dashboard dynamic so that the user is free to change the data visualization on demand is also a good practice, as there may be a perspective the user wishes to view that cannot be predicted while developing. Often times there are ways to get dynamic controls without having to code yourself, an example being Dundas Chart for OLAP Services which has a lot of end-user manipulation controls already built-in to the control.

Correctly Identifying KPIs (Key Performance Indicator)

A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a quantifiable measurement that reflects the factors which contribute to success within a company. Usually different people within the company or third party consultants agree upon these measurements beforehand, but sometimes these are defined by the dashboard developer. It is imperative that KPIs be chosen correctly, if they are not it can amount to incorrect data leading to bad decisions. Research and time should be devoted to learning the organization or group’s important indicators of success as this could make or break a dashboard.

Context

Context is an item which in most dashboards is completely forgotten. This is baffling, as without context, KPIs are completely useless. Consider the following two items of data:

Figure 7: Example data with no context

After a quick glance at Figure 7, the following assumptions are made: Nick is doing really well in sales and everyone else is not, and the revenue per sale is pretty high. This, however, may not be the case.

Figure 8: Same data as Figure 7 with context

Figure 8 shows the same data with context. In this case, it is clear from the chart that no employee has hit the sales target this month. As well, it can now be observed from the gauge that the revenue per sale is not within the expected range. Ideally the gauge should be further improved by an explanation as to what the range and marker are, but at the very least marking the gauge gives it sufficient context.

While giving context to data may seem like an obvious step, it is the most omitted practice by developers of dashboards. In most cases, context is left out because the person creating the dashboard has been working with the data so much they know what “good” and “bad” data is. This assumption, however, cannot be applied to the end user as they may draw false conclusions.

Visual Aesthetic

Visual aesthetics include animation, palettes, 2D and 3D effects, and the general look and feel of the actual controls. This is closely related to the layout of a dashboard but is concerned with the aesthetic appeal of specific items within a dashboard rather than the overall design. While visual aesthetics are important in making a dashboard attractive, developers must be careful that the visuals do not interfere with the usability and efficiency of the digital dashboard.

Customizability

While great care should be taken in deciding what data is important for the user of a dashboard to see, providing some ability to customize the view is a good practice to follow. This point is especially true in OLAP driven digital dashboards where the data is multidimensional and the only way to formulate a coherent picture of the data is to view it from all angles. As well, giving the user the ability to change their perspective of the data often allows them to see trends or important changes within it that the user may not have been able to see otherwise. Reporting Services is an excellent example of a tool that is devoted to giving the user the ability to modify the underlying data query with little effort, and as such has enjoyed great success in the enterprise market.

Before starting on a dashboard there are a few steps that should be considered. First, the platform that is used for the dashboard can have a severe impact on the available functionality. For example, Reporting Services was mentioned above for its ease of end-user customizability with respect to data. While this is true, Reporting Services has limitations when it comes to interaction with controls – something that the .NET platform does not. Thus, if it is of extreme importance that the user can highlight, zoom or select points on a Chart then Reporting Services would not be the right platform to choose. Making this decision before beginning implementation can save a lot of time, effort and headaches that can occur later in the development cycle.

In the same tone as platform choice, data storage choice is also a factor that should be considered before beginning implementation of a dashboard. Sometimes organizations will already be using a format for their data storage and may not be willing to have copies or move the data around. However, if this is not the case then choosing, for example, a standard SQL database or an OLAP database will result in very different data structures designed for very different data sets. Careful consideration should be taken when choosing a data storage format to find one that best fits the data.

When the above decisions have been made and implementation has begun, the last thing to do is to follow the best practices. This point may seem a bit redundant, especially given the topic of this paper, but ignoring any of the practices can have a serious detrimental effect to a dashboard project. If you are unsure of how to proceed when creating your dashboard, or do not have the resources to create one, Dundas Software offers our years of dashboard experience as an available consulting resource should you require it. Our consulting services can greatly speed up the development of a dashboard project as well as clarify any of the practices outlined above, resulting in an efficient and useful digital dashboard.

At the beginning of this document it was stated that a digital dashboard is a tool that allows a user to quickly monitor and analyze the performance of an organization or group. To this end, the best practices (Target User, Correctly Identifying KPIs, Context, Layout and Clarity, etc) have been formulated and written. Each practice has been carefully devised and clarified over the years to ensure that a dashboard following the practices will result in far more clarity than a dashboard that does not follow the practices. Readers of the best practices often think them to be obvious, but a quick look around at the numerous dashboards available on the internet shows that very few follow any significant number of the outlined practices, and almost none follow all of them.

The products offered by Dundas Software are all used for data visualization and fall naturally within the realm of digital dashboards. The .NET products, Dundas Chart, Dundas Gauge and Dundas Map are all designed to be flexible and end-user friendly, as well as easy to data-bind in order to make building a dashboard easy for a developer. Dundas Software also offers the same products for Reporting Services, and in addition, Dundas Calendar, as well as currently investing in Share Point and Windows Presentation Foundation for future products. With the wide array of platform support and data visualization tools available from Dundas Software, any dashboard can be built quickly and easily using a product that fits the requirements of the user. These products, combined with the best practices outlined in this document result in an efficient and useful dashboard every time.

Article content copyright by Dundas Software, 2006.