Hello, my name is Shadan Malik. I'm the president and CEO ofiDashboards. Today we are here to talk about the subject of enterprisedashboards.
Dashboards are all the buzz today, because they arefundamentally changing how we look at information, how we access information,and also how it affects our decision making. Traditionally, we have had thesespreadsheets and reports with lots of rows and columns of data. The challengebeing they are data rich, but information poor. That's where enter dashboards.So today we are going to examine the subject with four basic questions: what,who, how, and why.
First, what is a dashboard? The term obviously comes fromthe automotive dashboards, where user can get to all the key pieces ofinformation to drive a vehicle. In the same sense an enterprise dashboard is acollection of powerful visual elements such as bar charts, speedometers, maps,trend-lines. They all at a quick glance tell the user what are the keyperformance indicators and metrics.
As a result it helps in better analysis, better tracking ofinformation, proactive alerting, so when a certain key performance indicatorexceeds a threshold, a user is notified through emails or visual alerts thatthere's a problem.
The next is a drill-down. So when I see a problem, I havethe ability to get to the root cause analysis: where the problem happened, whatcaused the problem, when it was triggered.
Now, who is using dashboards? It has the widest spectrum ofapplications obviously.
Let's start with manufacturing, just take a few examples.Manufacturing organizations may be using it for supply chain, logistics,quality control, heath care. A hospital for example may be using it formonitoring patient satisfaction, or quality of care, and the performance ofphysicians and nurses.
Financial institutions like banks and credit unions. Theymay be using it to monitor loans and mortgages. Government. They could beusing, for example, in the local context, a county government is using it to monitorprison population, cost, and budgets. So as you can see the applications areall across the board.
That brings us to the next question: how? You can start fromone side of the spectrum and go to the other extreme. On the lower end, youhave lower cost solutions such as charting tools, or you can call it chartingwidgets. The challenge here is it takes a long time to implement. Often itneeds a lot of programming resources to put together a solution around this.
On the other extreme you have the BI dashboard platforms.They are expensive, but they provide robust security, a user framework that haspersonalization, customization, and all that. In between, you have a happymedium of niche players that provide a good dashboarding solution without a veryexpensive cost.
So that brings us to the point: why should enterpriseimplement dashboards, what are the benefits? First it improves accountabilityacross the organization. It helps improve transparency within the organization.When we have better accountability and transparency, it also improves thecompliance. And last but not the least, you have a better decision makingacross the organization.
So in closing, enterprise dashboards are truly helping tobring business intelligence to the masses.
