Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Architecture of a Dashboard

Dashboard means more than the simply integration of a myriad of reports, graphics, performance ratio etc, it is a very complicated process. Mr. Britton Manasco in his excellent blog Intelligence Economy.com presents us a Architecture of a Performance DashBoard. It's an interesting point of view that he got from Wayne Eckerson, director of Research and Services for the Data Warehousing Institute. Let me point out some of his thoughts:

...multiple layers in a performance management system:
  • Monitoring layer -- uses dashboards, scorecards or alerts to notify users of material changes in the performance of processes and activities.
  • Analysis layer -- lets users drill down into exception conditions and explore a problem's root cause using multidimensional analysis.
  • Reporting layer -- provides users with detailed operational data (such as a list of defective parts and the customers who received them) so they can take prompt action.
  • Planning layer -- lets managers employ the output of their analyses to create plans, models and scenarios, which are then fed back into the monitoring layer and encoded as targets and thresholds