商业智能仪表：如何构建报表测量商业价值

原文：

http://www.technologyreview360.com/business-intelligence-dashboards-that-measure-real-results/

Business Intelligence Dashboards: How to Build a Report that Measure Real Business Results

JUNE 3, 2013BY ARIEL GEIFMAN LEAVE A COMMENT

Did you look at the dashboard? “Didn’t have time yet…” “Sure I’ll get around to it sometime…” Sounds familiar? Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards are a necessary evil: On one hand everybody want to create them and as many of them as possible. On the other hand, managers don’t take the time to look at them, or analyze them. Sales executives, for example, love to see the bottom line, but do they really take the time to carefully analyze the dashboards in theCRM?

The real answer is that it’s not only management’s fault that so many Business Intelligence dashboards go unread. The truth to be told is that many BI dashboards are just too complex or provide too little value in order to justify the time it takes to review them. In addition, in the average company, there are too many BI dashboards going around for any one person to be able to read them all and do his real job.

Creating Business Intelligence dashboards is not only about the technical skills of getting the data out ofCognos, Tableau or any other tool, but rather about the process of understanding needs and measuring what matters.

Here is a guide for building stellar Business Intelligence dashboards that people actually use:

Assess needs and what your dashboard should measure

评估的需要和你的仪表应该测量什么？

The easiest thing is simply to start cranking. However, the first step in order to produce a highly usable Business Intelligence Dashboard is to assess the needs of all of the stakeholders that are going to use the dashboard.

Even if one executive orders the dashboard, there is still a need to list all of the stakeholders that use or are impacted by the report. For example, Sales dashboard impact both sales and marketing, and therefore both departmentsshould list what they would like to get out of the dashboard.

Understand the underlying business process behind the dashboard

Business processes are not isolated from one another and this understanding needs to be reflected in the dashboard. Closed sales are impacted by the number of leads brought by Marketing and customer churn is the results of the number of complaints and tickets that are received from customers.

Therefore, after understating what are the needs of the different stakeholders for the Business Intelligence dashboard make sure that you understand the underlying business process.

Decide on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The quality of your Business Intelligencedashboardis only as good as the quality of the KPIs that you chose to use. KPIs can be a whole course in business school, however in a nutshell, you need to track only what matters and only what drives your business.

Analysts make the mistake of tracking too many KPIs. This is typically the result of office politics, where a manager exclaims in one of the meetings “why aren’t we measuring traffic to our pricing page on our website on Sundays”. And Voilà, another chart on the dashboard.

Therefore, the person designing the dashboard should be cognizant enough and strong enough in order not to put any unnecessary KPIs into the dashboard. 90% or more of the data that your organization captures does not matter for anything. If you measure it, it does not mean that you need to present it. This is a hard task by itself.

Build Your Business Intelligence dashboards and they will come

Now, after you’ve made your research, decided on KPIs that makes sense, you are ready to start building your Business Intelligence dashboard. No matter what tool you are using, there are a few rules of thumb that you should be using:

• Visualize your data as much as possible: The best dashboards arecomprehensible at first glance and do not require a thorough examination of each number in order to understand the business insight.
• Highlight trends: Numbers are typically relative to other numbers… Did our sales grow from last month? Are we spending more on interest from month to month? What is the trend for traffic on our website? Make sure that you don’t only provide the number, but also the trend.
• Use the right charts: Bar charts are excellent for presenting monthly data, while line charts are best for trends. Pie charts can only be used when you want to highlight share of an overall, for example different categories in your budget.

After you have a first draft of your Business Intelligence dashboard, go to your team and see if it answers their business questions. A good dashboard is typically the result of multipleiterations and you can hardly get it right the first time.

Explain it

Dashboards are nice, but the best thing that you can do is include highlights of the dashboard every month. Many tools allow you to email the dashboard automatically based on aschedule. It is tempting, just set up an email at the beginning of the month and forget about it.

However, a dashboard without highlights and insights may go unopened. If you include a few bullet points of major changes each month and tell people what they should be looking at, your Business Intelligence dashboards are more likely to make sense.

Conclusion

Business Intelligence Dashboards are a must for every organization. However, most organizations have too many of them and very few quality dashboards. This guide should help you get the quality Business Intelligence dashboards that you organization deserves.