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  Comments Closed

Time to Consider Excel Dashboard Components?

There is a lot of material written by Excel MVPs on how to create Excel dashboards. One of the most popular sources of information for this is the ebook and templates by Charles Kyd of http://www.exceluser.com/

In this post, I look at the concept of building and using Excel dashboard components. Like complete Excel dashboards, such components would be charts or tables inside an Excel workbook. However, unlike complete Excel dashboards, these “components” would only be part of a collection of components picked by the dashboard’s user. The component would be picked from the spreadsheet, and mixed together with other Excel dashboard components in a full dashboard. End-users would build “personal Excel dashboards” by bringing together the tables and charts they want into a dashboard.

The idea of “component software” is not new: all modern software development environments support the building of software components that are plugged into frameworks. What may be new is the idea of applying the same concept to Excel spreadsheets and Excel dashboards.

The business view: I love Excel dashboards, but only if they show the information I want

According to Brian Carter in http://www.informationbuilders.com/new/newsletter/8-5/04_carter.html, “the use of dashboards continues to be one of the most popular applications of Excel.” He defines Excel dashboards as “a combination of indicative tables and charts, carefully positioned and conditionally formatted within a worksheet. The skilled blending of these elements provides a high-level view of business performance and is designed to trigger responses from the viewer.”

Excel dashboards are popular because Excel spreadsheets are familiar to managers and knowledge workers. They are easy to email and share. And in this bad economy, the fact that they cost so much less than BI dashboards should make them even more popular.

However, I have heard major objections to Excel dashboards from many managers. Some objections have to do with the dashboards not containing the charts and tables they want. Others complain that the “dashboards” do contain the information they want, but they also contain much more information they don’t want. These so-called dashboards are designed to satisfy the needs of whole groups of managers. They are so bloated and so huge that you can’t really call them dashboards (after all, can 15 screenfuls of charts and tables still meet the definition of a dashboard?).

A related complaint is that managers can get multiple Excel dashboards, each with only a part of the information they need. What they want is to have a single dashboard that contains all the information each individual user needs.

The IT view: Excel dashboards require a lot of work – we can only afford to do one shared one

For IT or “power users, ” there is one big difference between Excel dashboards and BI dashboards. Making a dashboard in Excel requires much more skill and effort than creating an equivalent dashboard in a business-intelligence (BI) tool designed specifically for creating dashboards. As a result, there simply is not enough time to make different dashboards for each individual user. Users will just have to make do with a “one size fits all” dashboard created from a template shared by all.

Unfortunately, what happens is that each user requests an additional table, column, or chart that they absolutely want. By the time the poor dashboard author/programmer has placed all the pieces requested by all the users, he realizes he has created a monster. It’s a dashboard not even the author can love.

Bridging View: personalized Excel dashboards built from “dashboard components”

This problem is quite similar to the one that hit mainstream computer applications decades ago. As applications became more and more complex, it became impossible to build them as monolithic programs. The concept of “object-oriented programming” was a first step. But eventually, applications were built as aggregations of independent components.

The most popular portal and dashboard applications today are those that allow relatively unskilled users to assemble their personal dashboards from the components they consider important. Users can just select the components they want from a large set of options, and drag/drop them into their personal dashboards.

Authors and programmers can then focus on making dashboard components, and let users put them together as they wish. This greatly simplifies the task of authors, while pleasing their users more.

We have made it a goal in Excelential to make this dream scenario a reality for Excel-based dashboards. The problem we have seen with Excel dashboards is that making one requires so much skill and care, that ordinary end-users can’t be trusted to build their own. Excel MVPs and skilled users can make and maintain pure Excel dashboards, but casual Excel users will not be able to do so.

We are building Excelential to make it possible for end-users to treat any part of a spreadsheet they receive as a component for their personal Excelential dashboards. As for the authors and developers of the spreadsheets, we are working to allow them to build “ordinary” Excel spreadsheets to serve as the dashboard components.

January 21, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: dashboards  Comments Closed