Tips, techniques, and trends on how to use dashboard technology to optimize business performance

Business performance management is a hot new management discipline that delivers tremendous value when supported by information technology. Through case studies and industry research, this book shows how leading companies are using performance dashboards to execute strategy, optimize business processes, and improve performance.

Wayne W. Eckerson (Hingham, MA) is the Director of Research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), the leading association of business intelligence and data warehousing professionals worldwide that provide high?quality, in?depth education, training, and research. He is a columnist for SearchCIO.com, DM Review, Application Development Trends, the Business Intelligence Journal, and TDWI Case Studies & Solution.

This book contains tips, techniques, and trends on how to use dashboard technology to optimize business performance. Business performance management is a hot new management discipline that delivers tremendous value when supported by information technology. Through case studies and industry research, this book shows how leading companies are using performance dashboards to execute strategy, optimize business processes, and improve performance. Wayne W. Eckerson (Hingham, MA) is the Director of Research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), the leading association of business intelligence and data warehousing professionals worldwide that provide high quality, in depth education, training, and research. He is a columnist for SearchCIO.com, DM Review, Application Development Trends, the Business Intelligence Journal, and TDWI Case Studies and Solution.

Performance dashboards are rapidly becoming the preferred way that business professionals view and analyze information about the performance of their business and the activities they manage. In a nutshell, performance dashboards let busy executives, managers, and staff view the performance of key business metrics at a glance and then move swiftly through successive layers of actionable information in a carefully guided manner, so they get the insight they need to solve problems quickly, efficiently, and effectively. By helping business people keep a pulse on their business and chart progress towards meeting strategic and tactical objectives, performance dashboards are becoming powerful agents of organizational change.

In Performance Dashboards, author Wayne Eckerson shows how performance dashboards focus business people on the right things to do and doing things right. As Director of Research and Services for The Data Warehousing Institute, a worldwide association of business intelligence professionals, Eckerson interviewed dozens of organizations that have built various types of performance dashboards in different industries and lines of business. His practical insights provide a road map to help you turbo?charge performance–management initiatives with dashboard technology to optimize performance and accelerate results.

Performance Dashboards addresses common questions that business professionals ask about performance dashboards, such as: What?s the difference between dashboards and scorecards? How do I design performance dashboards to handle operational, tactical, and strategic processes? How do I create effective KPIs that drive organizational change and display them in an optimal fashion? Do I build performance dashboards from the top down or bottom up? What political obstacles will I encounter when launching a performance dashboard project and how do I overcome them?

Performance Dashboards clears up much of the confusion and answers your most critical questions. It starts by laying a conceptual foundation, showing how performance dashboards:

• Fit into the larger context of business performance management (BPM), an emerging discipline for linking strategy and performance
• Represent the "new face" of business intelligence (BI), harnessing reporting and analysis software to unleash the power of information to all types of business users
• Do everything in threes: three types of performance dashboards (i.e., operational, tactical, and strategic) each contain three types of applications (i.e., monitoring, analysis, and management) and three layers of information (i.e., graphical, multidimensional, and transactional)

Moving from concept to reality, Performance Dashboards showcases each type of performance dashboard using a real?world example from Quicken Loans, International Truck and Engine Corporation, and Hewlett–Packard. These and other case studies show you how to build performance dashboards and what benefits they offer. Finally, Performance Dashboards synthesizes the tips and techniques from these case studies and leading practitioners in the field, showing you how to:

• Evaluate your company?s organizational and technical readiness to undertake a successful performance dashboard project
• Create effective KPIs that change organizational behavior and improve performance
• Design powerful dashboard screens that communicate relevant facts quickly and concisely
• Integrate existing performance dashboards and metrics using a top?down or bottom?up approach
• Align business and technical teams to deliver a scalable and sustainable solution
• Evangelize a performance dashboard solution and ensure end?user adoption

Whether you are an executive looking to learn more about dashboards or scorecards, an IT professional needing to better understand how to implement dashboards, or a college student preparing for a career armed with the most cutting?edge thinking about how to improve organizational performance, Performance Dashboards is for you.

Praise for Performance Dashboards

"The best way that executives can drive their business today is through an interactive dashboard that contains both historic and forward?looking measures. Eckerson?s book, with its practical advice, is essential reading for anyone moving forward with a dashboard initiative. Even if you are not yet ready to make the move, it is fascinating to read his insights into how some of the industry?s smartest competitors keep their finger on the pulse of their business."
—Craig Schiff, President and CEO, BPM Partners, Inc.

"Wayne Eckerson, in his new book on performance dashboards, has defined what business intelligence really is in a practical and prescriptive manner. His book serves anyone who is looking to understand this complex subject and especially provides value to leaders looking to apply business intelligence at their firm. Wayne defines the subject, explains the methodology, and provides the reader with the incentive to take on this challenging effort."
—Irving H. Tyler, Vice President, Information Services and Chief Information Officer, Quaker Chemical Corporation

"The time is right for a definitive guide to building, managing, and sustaining dashboard and scorecard solutions, and this book fits the bill. As a key ingredient in business performance management, dashboards make it easier to monitor the execution of business strategies and plans, and deliver insight and information to workers across the enterprise. This book is a must?read for business leaders and would?be chief performance officers who want to learn about the tools and techniques needed to harness information and optimize performance."
—Godfrey Sullivan, President and Chief Executive Officer, Hyperion Solutions Corporation

"This book explains what dashboards are, where they can be used, and why they are important to measuring and managing performance. Wayne uses his deep knowledge of the BI market and examples from leading practitioners to show how any organization can use performance dashboards to achieve a competitive advantage."
—Mark Smith, CEO and Senior Vice President of Research, Ventana Research

"Performance dashboards are essential to business success. This book provides a complete and thorough overview of performance dashboards for both business users and IT staff who want to be successful in managing the performance of their business."
—Colin White, founder, BI Research

WAYNE W. ECKERSON is the Director of Research and Services for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), a worldwide association of business intelligence and data warehousing professionals that provides education, training, certification, and research. Eckerson has seventeen years of industry experience, most of which has been spent covering business–intelligence issues and technologies. Eckerson is the author of many in?depths reports, a columnist for several business and technology magazines, and a noted speaker and consultant in the business intelligence industry. He can be reached at weckerson@tdwi.org.

2007-04-11 Quo vadis?

For purposes of discussion, pretend that your organization is a vehicle within which you and your associates travel en route to a series of destinations; for example, various stages of progressively improved operational efficiency and progressively increased profitability. One key question arises: How well is your vehicle performing?

The three "dashboards" (i.e. operational, tactical, and strategic) that Wayne Eckerson offers in this volume can help to answer that question. "The monitoring application conveys critical information at a glance using timely and relevant data, usually with graphical elements; the analysis application lets users analyze and explore performance data across multiple dimensions and at different levels of detail to get at the root cause of problems and issues; the management application fosters communication among executives, managers, and staff and gives executives continuous feedback across a range of critical activities, enabling them to `steer' their organizations in the right direction."

The ultimate success of the cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system which Eckerson discusses in this book depends on several factors: sufficient leadership and resources at all levels of implementation, correct and consistent application of the right metrics, a compelling graphical user interface, and contingency planning which ensures user adoption while driving the organizational changes.

I especially appreciate Eckerson's provision of three mini case studies that illustrate how -- in real-world situations - the three performance "dashboards" can achieve the desired objectives. Specifically, those that are operational (Quicken Loans, Inc., pages 127-141), those which are tactical (International Truck and Engine Corp., pages 143-158), and those which are strategic (Hewlett Packard Co., pages 159-177). I also appreciate the material provided in Part Three (Critical Success Factors: Tips from the Trenches) as Eckerson correlates various multilayered applications built on business intelligence and data integration infrastructure that enables any organization (regardless of size or nature) to measure, monitor, and manage business performance more effectively.

All executives recognize the importance of accurate and consistent measurement of what really matters. Obviously, the "what" varies (sometimes significantly) from one organization to another. In my opinion, the three performance "dashboards" that Eckerson recommends can be of substantial benefit, whatever the given "what" may be but if - and only if - the aforementioned success factors are present. To repeat, they are: sufficient leadership and resources at all levels of implementation, correct and consistent application of the right metrics, a compelling graphical user interface, and contingency planning which ensures user adoption while driving the organizational changes.

This book is by no means an "easy read" but it will generously reward those who absorb and digest its material with appropriate care. Then what? He fully understands how difficult it is to ensure adoption by others, and, to manage performance effectively throughout the given enterprise. In the final chapter, Eckerson notes that performance dashboards can easily backfire and cause performance to decline or stall instead of climb. He then identifies what he characterizes as eight cardinal sins " that can turn a performance dashboard into a performance quagmire." How to avoid them? Eckerson offers nine strategies to ensure adoption and eight strategies to manage performance.

I highly recommend this brilliant book as well as Dean Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement. Both are eminently worthy of thoughtful and rigorous consideration. However, that said, I also offer a caveat expressed by Peter Drucker in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." Invoking again the "vehicle" metaphor introduced in the first paragraph of this brief commentary, I presume to suggest that if you and your companions don't know where you are going, "any road will get you there."