September 3, 2002

Built for Speed

Executive dashboards are a requirement for intelligent organizations that need to respond to threats and opportunities in an "agile" manner

by Nancy Zurell

The term executive dashboard is receiving a lot of play these days from business intelligence (BI) vendors. Many IT managers are also beginning to use the terms executive dashboard and portal synonymously.

Contrary to this new idiomatic trend, however, the two technologies aren't synonymous, although they are similar. An enterprise portal is just that: a portal. It's a browser-based gateway to integrated information and applications to promote information sharing, consistency, and accessibility to members of the organizational value chain. An executive dashboard — although it uses the same underlying technology — is a much smaller-scale subset of portal technology that provides specific, performance-based information to upper-level management.

In short, a dashboard is a one-screen "cockpit" of all critical measurements for piloting a company, offering actionable information at management's fingertips, business performance measurements at a glance, and up-to-date information on status and forecasts against benchmarks. Executive dashboards are ideal proof-of-concept BI projects, and they're an absolute must for any organization that wants to keep a finger on the pulse of its business activities.

What is a Dashboard?

There are two major differences between enterprise portals and executive dashboards: scope and purpose. A portal's scope is enterprisewide; it serves as a single-point nexus that connects all the partners in an organization's value chain. Customers, vendors, employees, executive management — anyone or any organization that's a stakeholder can be a portal user. For example, employees can access ERP functionality, customer information, sales databases, stored documents (from anywhere in the organization), and the Internet. Value chain partners — with the appropriate level of security — can access inventory, call up sales histories, download marketing materials, and place or check the status of orders. In essence, a portal is an enterprisewide gateway to manage traffic up and down the value chain.

Alternatively, executive dashboards have a much narrower audience — executive management — and a more granular purpose: summarizing and reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs). Dashboards give executive management real-time answers to the question, "How well are we doing?"

Executive dashboards present corporate KPIs that are tied to business goals and industry benchmarks and best practices. They do so by leveraging BI tools and the organizational intranet to gather data from legacy systems or corporate data warehouses. The results are presented as graphs and charts in a browser-based format that makes for a no-nonsense, efficient business monitoring system.

However, an executive dashboard isn't just a jumble of pie charts and pretty bar graphs. Rather, it's literally a one-page overview of all critical measurements necessary to make crucial executive decisions that will affect the organization's bottom line. For instance, a telecom company might want to build a dashboard to track KPIs in its finance business unit. Metrics that could be of interest include gross margin, earnings before interest and taxes, bad debt ratios, payables and receivables aging, and SG&A expenses per product line and employee — the list could go on and on, and it's not restricted to telecom companies. Any organization that needs to monitor KPIs in order to make critical decisions can benefit from a dashboard.

But how can you distinguish an executive dashboard from a garden-variety BI application? There's a list of features that every dashboard should provide, or it's really not a dashboard. Specifically, a dashboard should give your organization:

• A single screen, browser-based portrait of the organization with drill-down capability on each KPI monitored
• Real-time presentation of information in chart and graph format, based on data pulled from the corporate data warehouse, data marts, or legacy systems
• Slice-and-dice capability on KPIs that let users perform what-if and sensitivity analysis
• Integrated management of KPIs and issues raised by their performance levels — all based on appropriate and individual user-based security clearances.

Technical Architecture Issues

How does an executive dashboard work? The architecture is rather straightforward. First, a Web server acts as the access mechanism for the dashboard. The Web server provides the gateway between the dashboard user and the application itself. All user information is presented through the Web-browser interface.

The next component is the analytic engine, which is usually an online analytic processing (OLAP) tool such as Cognos Inc.'s PowerPlay or Business Objects SA's BusinessObjects. (See the sidebar "What Do the BI Vendors Offer?.") The analytic engine does the data gathering and number crunching requested by the user. The analytic engine gets its information from a database specifically designed — usually with a star or snowflake schema — to make the OLAP engine efficient.

Data for the dashboard database is gathered from the organization's legacy systems, corporate data warehouse, data marts, or just about anywhere necessary to supply the needed KPI information.

There are two architectural camps for dashboard architecture: Some designers favor a fully distributed architecture with each piece residing on a different machine. (See Figure 1.) Others favor a range of partially distributed architectures with all or parts of the dashboard application residing on the same (really powerful) machine.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. In the case of the fully distributed architecture, the downside is obvious: high maintenance, high cost, and possibly, slower performance. However, the upside, while not as obvious, is attractive. First, it's much easier to secure the distributed architecture because there are multiple firewalls and access controls. A hacker would have to know how to crack each machine to hack the entire system. And, if one part of the system goes down, the entire system won't crash like so many dominoes. In fact, depending on the redundancy built into the architecture, the information could be quickly rerouted around the downed component with very little downtime.

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