Speedometers v. Speeding Tickets

Just a quick pop-in to make a note about dashboards. There is a tendency to put a bunch of metrics on one page, maybe spice it up with a couple of charts (green, yellow, and red, of course!), and call it a dashboard. I think it's worthwhile to make a distinction between the concepts of a report and a dashboard.

Say you're driving down the road. You look ahead and spot a State Trooper hiding out in the bushes. You quickly glance down at your speedometer and note that you are exceeding the posted speed limit. You let off on the accelerator a bit, gliding past the Trooper unnoticed. That is the value of your dashboard. You knew how to evaluate the conditions, which indicators were relevant under the current circumstances, and you knew what actions to take to deliver the desired results. You were able to take action because you had the information quickly enough to avoid an undesirable consequence.

A report is a speeding ticket. Your behind is already in court. By the time you get the report (which, by definition, is at the end of a reporting period) the consequence is a foregone conclusion. Please don't call it a dashboard simply because you have before you, on one page, results from a number of different systems.

There is one characteristic of a good corporate dashboard that is an improvement on a real-world dashboard--such as one found in a car or in the cockpit of an airplane--and that is the ability to drilldown on a high-level result. I would submit that, without that capability, what you really have is a report based on a shorter time period.

Speaking of time period, to determine whether a metric is appropriate for a dashboard environment, you have to determine at what point the data is relevant. For example, if you have sent out a mailing and the results wildly fluctuate on a daily basis and it isn't statistically valid until you have the whole mailing back anyway, it's not useful to to have your finger on the pulse of those results. Plus, maybe you can't react on that in the short-term, anyway. On the other hand, if you sell Olympic-themed t-shirts and your orders vary with the tally of gold medals won, dialing in your just-in-time manufacturing operation could have a big impact on waste and profitability. So when you're designing your performance analytics schema, focus on decision-making processes where quicker information results in better decision-making and the business is prepared to react more quickly as a result.