At The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) conference held in Las Vegas recently, Cindi Howson, Analyst and Founder of “BIScorecard”, taught a class on Dashboards that provided some valuable insights into the topic.
She pointed out that, historically, to the extent that companies used dashboards, they have had to code their own customized versions. Now, however, BI platform vendors and smaller vendors like “QlikTech, Tableau, Domo, Dundas and iDashboards” are able to provide those capabilities.
Howson also spoke at length on the differences between BI dashboards and scorecards. She referred to a dashboard as an application that displays various visual indicators to monitor the state of the business at a glance, much as a car’s dashboard lets us monitor its current state. The dashboard can contain charts, cross tabs, trend lines, etc.
A scorecard can, in a general sense, be anything that tracks key performance indicators (KPIs). But, to conform to the technical definition, it is a tracking methodology certified by the “Balanced Scorecard Collaborative”. By this standard, the information is organized into the 4 categories prescribed by Norton-Kaplan, the authors and strategic consultants. These are Customer, Financial, Internal Processes, and Learning and Growth.
A strategic scorecard will not only have key performance indicators but will also assign accountability and show relationships. As an example, Howson says, if you have a goal for financials to grow sales, then how does employee training, recruitment or customer service relate to that?
A metric is any kind of measurement. It is more generic than a KPI, but some people use the terms interchangeably. KPIs are meaningful because they are measured against a desired target, to determine the status or progress toward that target. When a KPI is embedded in a target, it may raise the question of how that target was set, and whether or not it can be modified.
With a full scorecard application, users do have the ability to modify their targets based on external events. But, in a dashboard, a target is stored somewhere and usually only updated annually or perhaps, quarterly.
A dashboard is often a daily operational tool to show what is happening in real time, although a management-style dashboard with more summary information may be referenced less frequently. A scorecard is not intended as a day-to-day tool. It usually requires high-level executive sponsorship, and is used more as an ongoing check to keep people aligned with the strategic goals of the business.
In reference to the potential impact that Big Data will have on dashboards, Howson says that the volume and velocity aspects of Big Data certainly apply to dashboards, and some dashboard products can bring in the variety element, too. In fact, the challenges of Big Data create even more justification for implementation of tools that can be used for measuring and analyzing that data on as real-time a basis as possible. Hence, the dashboard can have an important role in doing so.
