Real-time Dashboards: Not Appropriate for Business

The marketing departments of “business intelligence dashboards” keep emphasizing that their dashboards give managers “real-time” or “up-to-the-minute” information on how their business is doing.  They make it sound like a real benefit that all managers and business owners should appreciate.  Don’t be fooled.

At the lower levels of the organization, where people are responsible for operations that require constant monitoring, a real-time dashboard might make sense.  For example, an air-traffic controller or a stock market trader might need up-to-the-second information in order to properly perform their jobs.

But managers are responsible for much more than just monitoring operations.  They need to spend time working with people, creating and revising plans, analyzing trends, and a host of other activities with a time horizon measured in days or longer.   For such activities, a real-time dashboard would be a distraction rather than a help.

Imagine you had a “business intelligence dashboard” on your desk giving you second-by-second readings of the “key performance indicators” of your business.  If you kept staring at it, you wouldn’t have time to get anything done.   You’d be like my teenage sons, playing video games all day.  You’d be mesmerized by the continuously updating screen, forgetting that success in business comes from planning and taking action, not from staring at your KPIs all day.

However, if you ignored those real-time updates, you would miss much of the information that a real-time dashboard provides.   Real-time dashboards are populated with gauges and “traffic-light” indicators.    Since they are real-time, they are updated at least once every few seconds.   That means if you blink, or if you turn your head away to look at a person you’re talking to, you’ll miss that split-second when the gauge fell to 0, or when the traffic-light turned green.   You would miss out on the benefits of having that split-second information!

Think about it.  What business events need to be known by you on a real-time basis?  They would be emergencies or split-second opportunities (like a chance to snag a major deal).  Those wouldn’t be the types of things that would appear on a business intelligence dashboard.  You can’t predict when emergencies or opportunities arise.  So, you can’t have them on your dashboard.

The problem with a dashboard that is designed for real-time information is that it will have to show instantaneous or short-term data only.  For example gauges and “traffic light” controls that adorn most business-intelligence dashboards show the value of a business indicator at one point in time, only.  As I said earlier, you can’t even blink without losing the information the gauge or traffic-light had been showing.

Even the charts on a real-time dashboard can cover only a very short time span.  Since they are supposed to show data that is being refreshed every few seconds, the chart will very quickly run out of room.  Just think, there are 365 * 24 * 60 = 525,600 minutes in a year.  If a dashboard chart is being updated every minute, and you wanted to see a year’s worth of data, it would have to be at least as wide as 200 PC screens!  And a minute-by-minute refresh is technically not even real-time.

So think about your own situation.   How often do you really have to look at your business indicators?  Isn’t once or twice a day more than enough?  In fact, you probably need to look at some business indicators only once a month, right?  So, why have a business dashboard that is updated more frequently than that?

When you resolve to only monitor your KPIs once or twice a day, you will be able to design a dashboard that shows longer-term data and trends.  That is because there are fewer data points to plot on the dashboard’s charts.  For example, you can very easily fit sales and profit trends for 13 months in a small but very readable bar chart.  Or, you can fit daily production numbers for the last 60 days in another small but readable line chart.  In fact, you will have the ability to cram information on a host of KPIs for a year or more on a single screen.

As a manager or business owner, you need to see charts or tables showing the values of more business indicators, over a longer period of time, on a dashboard.   That will allow you to focus on the big picture and the long term.  And, if you look at that dashboard only once or twice a day, you have time to actually plan and act.

January 25, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: dashboards

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