Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 7-24
Executive Dashboards
To understand and appreciate the value of this type of reporting interface, you need to walk in the shoes
of corporate business leaders. A typical corporate officer deals with a lot of people and a variety of infor-
mation in a day and often needs to make immediate decisions based on this information. When moving
from meeting to meeting, transaction-level details are too granular for most decisions. Business leaders
need to know how the business is performing overall and whether there are areas of concern or notable
success. I've sat in a lot of meetings with a general manager or director sitting on one side of the table
and subject experts on another. The officer begins by saying “So, how are we doing?” The subject expert
gives a lengthy presentation, stepping through PowerPoint slides, charts, graphs, and diagrams that
depict trends and variances based on mountains of data. After the presentation, the officer concludes
with the question: “So, how are we doing?” Scorecards and dashboards answer this all-important ques-
tion using succinct summary values and simple graphical, symbolic progress indicators.
Although simplification is a key concept, scorecards go beyond just keeping reports simple. Trends and
success indicators should be clear and easy to understand but should provide an avenue to discover
more detail and to view related trends and summaries. These objectives are easily achieved using drill-
down and drill-through report features.
Targets and KPIs
These are the fundamental concepts behind business scorecards. For any given measurement, a target is
simply an objective value. Targets are often data-driven values such as a Budget, Quota, Baseline, or
Goal. A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a set of thresholds used to measure actual values with the
target. KPIs may define banding indicators to signify a range of variances like poor, acceptable, and
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