Excel Reports as Information Dashboard Prototypes

I've built a lot of scorecards and dashboards over the years - for public and private sector organizations and even a Business Intelligence vendor. The projects can be long and costly; the requirements complex and highly contentious. It takes forever, and the results never really change the way the organization behaves.

The most successful implementations I have seen began with an Excel spreadsheet. Not that a dashboard project should end with Excel - that is not my point at all. Excel has many failings that make it totally inappropriate as a long-term dashboard solution. But starting with Excel is a really good idea.

Excel gives you the flexibility to change your mind - fast. And that is crucial in the early days of a dashboard initiative. If things are going well, you should expect new requirements and changes every single day. Your users should be reacting with their likes and dislikes every time you release a new version. This iterative process should never end, but it will slow down.

As your users come to some sense of clarity about what their business is about and how to measure it, it is time to begin a full-scale dashboard or scorecard implementation using either a commercial off the shelf product, or your own development team.

Prototype with Excel. Iterate fast. Then deliver a solid solution. But don't ever expect the change to stop. If it does, your dashboard project has failed.

Learn how to make your dashboard project a success: DashboardSuccess.com

Imperfect People: Can Information Dashboards Help?

I started my career reading "In Search of Excellence" and "Reengineering the Corporation) - believing that all problems in organizations were the result of good people stuck in bad systems. I believed that re-engineered processes, good strategy, and even good BI was the solution to all ills.

Imagine my surprise and disenchantment when I discovered that organizations are actually limited by the psychosis of their inhabitants. Fear, greed, jealousy, self-satisfied superiority, self-doubt and uncertainty cannot be overcome by "good systems".

The common feature of all of these human attributes is that they are defense mechanisms designed to protect us from hurt. What if I lose my job? What if my colleague gets promoted and I don't? I could be more effective if only I weren't surrounded by idiots!

And these attributes have two unsatisfactory outcomes:

• they encourage us to avoid reality - to refuse to see things as they really are
• they prevent us from having healthy honest and fully open dialogs with our colleagues

A mature organization is one in which people have found themselves able to move beyond these issues, and address problems and opportunities as they are. The have the personal strength and fortitude to accept the truth, even if it hurts them.

Information Dashboards designed by fearful people will make the situation worse. However, those designed by mature people who are passionate about the truth even to the perceived detriment of their own careers in the short-term have promise to help others reach that level of maturity.

A mature manager can move to improve the maturity of her team. But a mature analyst can move to improve the maturity of executives far above.

As a junior analyst many years ago, I wrote a report setting out a strategy for the organization I was in, and using that strategy to inform the development of "MIS statistics" - what would now be called BI. My boss - a strong willed person who was afraid spent a morning reaming me out for overstepping my role. I've never been good with confrontation, but I stood my ground. My passion for truth outweighed my fear about losing my job. Fortunately, her boss agreed with me, and the result was a very happy story.

No matter where you work, or what your title is, I encourage you to have courage, take a risk, and do what is right for your organization today.

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Information Dashboard Success

Building a Better Information Dashboard

It's a sad truth that Information Dashboard projects frequently fail or get killed.

I've written a quick note to explain the reasons why and offer three essential steps you can take to build a better Information Dashboard in your organization: Building a Better Information Dashboard

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Information Dashboard Success

Logistics and Supply Chain Dashboard

Blue Sky Logistics offers a dashboard that gives insight into the logistics and suppy chain function.



The prominence of "Alerts" here is interesting - as I have observed elsewhere however, alerts should be qualitative information entered by humans. If machine generated, they can typically be represented in a different form - perhaps with traffic lights or other indicators of urgency.

Cash-to-cash is an important thing to measure regionally - I wonder how they would manage a very deep hierarchy of regions.

For order fullfillment cycle time, I would tend to use a bullet chart if horizontal display is desired. To my eye, its difficult to translate the bars into their meaning - another possibility would be to display them as columns. I find the Return on Supply Chain fixed assets column chart easier to read than the order fullfillment bar chart.

Hopefully, there are options to display periods with better labels than "1,2,3,4,5" on the perfect order fullfillment chart. I also want to see this broken out by facility etc. Sparklines?

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Information Dashboard Success

Real-estate CRM Dashboard

I came across Bluetree Direct today. They show a nice little CRM system for Real-estate agents. The dashboard portion of the product appears to have been created using xCelsius.I find it interesting how XCelsius dashboards show so much better in an interactive demo than in a screen grab. The engagement really seems to be about the animation of the charts - as a report writer, XCelsius is only average.

There is actually not much to like in this dashboard. Clicking on the "Source" pie chart likely changes the data shown in the other three charts, but this will cause you to have to remember the Email results in order to compare with the Direct Mail results which is what you want to compare. It would be much better to offer a view in which deal size, sales status and other information can be compared across the marketing "channels".

I do like Bluetree's full range service, including graphical template selection, automatic printing and direct mail along with email and other forms of marketing at the click of a mouse. The dashboard could use a bit of work.

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Information Dashboard Success

Dashboard: Rear-view mirror or Heads Up Display?

Chris Carren who hails from Business Objects and is now general manager of Microsoft's Office Business Applications division (interesting in its own right) released an interview yesterday concerning Microsoft PerformancePoint. He says:

There's also been a huge evolution in how customers want to think about business intelligence. They are showing an eagerness to move away from the traditional methods of sharing information, like sending reports out via e-mail that capture what transpired the previous quarter or reporting period. Instead, they want a metric-centric view via a Web-based scorecard or dashboard that focuses more on what's happening now, and even more importantly, what likely will happen next week or next month.

That last sentence is interesting. Although predictive analytics firms have been around for years, they have achieved little penetration into the mainstream market. Witness Cognos's acquistion of a product "Forethought" about 7 or 8 years ago that was promptly buried.

Today, I think Chris is right on the money due to a few key shifts in the market.

1. The demand for forecasting and enterprise planning solutions has picked up in recent years, as people try to move off spreadsheets and into something more integrated, accurate and controllable. Sarbanes-Oxley contributes to this among other things.
2. Increased focus on data-based decision making. While many organizations do still struggle to get accurate data, a substantial number now have this under control and business intelligence is part of their management process.
3. The "Competing on Analytics" trend is just beginning to take off. Companies are starting to realize the power of statistical analysis, experimental design and forecasting to improve their business results.

As the "quants" get involved, SAS and SPSS get a big push. But amateur quants also need tools - hence Excel 2007 SP2 in which users can run the data mining features of SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 from their desktops.

I first heard the phrase "driving by looking in the rear-view mirror" in one of the early Balanced Scorecard books. Kaplan and Norton used this as an analogy for managing your business by looking at past financial results only. They encouraged organizations to seek "leading indicators" that would drive future financial results.

Still, scorecards and dashboards typically only display the past, even if they include leading indicators. What Chris is talking about (and Thomas Davenport for that matter), is using the past to statistically predict the future, and display that on the dashboard.

I'm not sure dashboard is quite the right image for this trend. Instead, I think about the heads-up display. Managers are razor focused on the airspace ahead, with analytical and predictive information thrown up on the windscreen. A warning light indicates something bad might happen. A predictive chart validates whether the executive intuition matches historical projections. All in real-time with reaction times down to the hair trigger.

Compare that picture to the stodgy data warehouse and BI departments and vendors that litter our corporate battle field...


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Information Dashboard Success

XCelsius: Eye Candy for BO

I had the opportunity to sit through a Business Objects sales presentation earlier today. Here are a few things that surprised me:

First, I had missed the significance of their acquisitions in the data quality and ETL space. They now claim to be competitive with Ascential and Informatica for ETL, and to have acquired the number 2 player in data cleansing. I have no idea if this actually works on the ground - whether the products integrate, whether they are as good as they say, or whether BO actually knows anything about these areas. However, it does make for a compelling sales pitch.

Text analytics is an area I had heard they were making a foray into. The sales rep pushed that hard and talked about the capability to generate automatic reports containing structured and unstructured information. Again, no show - just tell, so I don't know how much is smoke.

XCelsius is a sexy product, though I have numerous concerns about it as an effective dashboard or analytical tool. I should not have been surprised that BO sales is leading 100% of their demos with it. They surf over the data architecture issues, and spend all their time showing the "interactive" Flash dials, charts etc. I couldn't believe they showed almost nothing else in their suite in a 1 hour demo!

Desktop widgets are cool. Essentially they can put any BO content into a desktop widget, which can then occupy portions of the user's desktop with updates in real-time. I had considered doing this with Google Desktop, but don't think they have much corporate penetration. BO's offering is again the kind of eye-candy that account execs can use to overturn any kind of real objections and get buyers emotionally involved.

Information Dashboard Success

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