Dashboards: The new face of BI

Dashboards are being increasingly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence, because they can communicate complex information quickly, translating information into visually presentations, and they are also easy to use by business users, permitting to view the performance of business metrics at a glance and make decisions effectively and quickly. The dashboards transform BI from tools used by executives, information workers and power users to tools used by everyone in the company.

A performance dashboard is a multilayered application built on a business intelligence and data integration infrastructure that enables organizations to measure, monitor, and manage business performance more effectively. The performance dashboards are defined as three applications in one, woven and working together: monitoring application, analysis application and management application.

The performance dashboards have three layers or views of information: summarized graphical view (top layer), multidimensional view (middle layer) and detailed reporting view (bottom layer):
- Summarized graphical view - provides a summarized view, usually graphical, of the status of key performance metrics and exception conditions. This layer is where users monitor information. The technologies used are dashboards, scorecards and portal interface.
- Multidimensional View - provides the data behind the graphical metrics and alerts. Using multidimensional analysis tools, users navigate the data by dimension and hierarchies (slice and dice, drill-down, drill-up). The technologies used are online analytical processing (OLAP), parameterized reporting and advanced visualization tools.
- Detailed reporting view - lets users view detailed reports and transaction records. This layer connects users to existing operational reports or dynamically queries a data warehouse or operational system to obtain the records.

There are three types of dashboards: operational, tactical and strategic. The operational dashboards monitor core operational process and deliver detailed information that is only lightly summarized. The tactical dashboards are used in process or projects by a limited people. They are usually updated daily or weekly and have detailed and summarized data. The strategic dashboards are used to monitor strategic objectives. The objective of strategic dashboards are to align the organization, and is frequently implemented using the concepts of Balanced Scorecard.

To integrating performance dashboards, the companies can to use two kinds of approaches: centralized or federated. The centralized is the best way to integrate performance dashboards, automatically generating custom dashboards to the organization. The federate approach is used to link existing and incompatible performance dashboards.

The main benefits of performance dashboards are to communicate and refine strategy, give a consistent view of the business and deliver actionable information.

P.S. - The book Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business, written by Wayne W. Eckerson, is a reference on the subject.