Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business
Performance dashboards are rapidly becoming the preferred way that business professionals view and analyze information about the performance of their business and the activities they manage. In a nutshell, performance dashboards let busy executives, managers, and staff view the performance of key business metrics at a glance and then move swiftly through successive layers of actionable information in a carefully guided manner, so they get the insight they need to solve problems quickly, efficiently, and effectively. By helping business people keep a pulse on their business and chart progress towards meeting strategic and tactical objectives, performance dashboards are becoming powerful agents of organizational change.In Performance Dashboards, author Wayne Eckerson shows how performance dashboards focus business people on the right things to do and doing things right.  As Director of Research and Services for The Data Warehousing Institute, a worldwide association of business intelligence professionals, Eckerson interviewed dozens of organizations that have built various types of performance dashboards in different industries and lines of business. His practical insights provide a road map to help you turbo-charge performance–management initiatives with dashboard technology to optimize performance and accelerate results.Performance Dashboards addresses common questions that business professionals ask about performance dashboards, such as:  What's the difference between dashboards and scorecards? How do I design performance dashboards to handle operational, tactical, and strategic processes? How do I create effective KPIs that drive organizational change and display them in an optimal fashion? Do I build performance dashboards from the top down or bottom up? What political obstacles will I encounter when launching a performance dashboard project and how do I overcome them?Performance Dashboards clears up much of the confusion and answers your most critical questions. It starts by laying a conceptual foundation, showing how performance dashboards:Fit into the larger context of business performance management (BPM), an emerging discipline for linking strategy and performanceRepresent the "new face" of business intelligence (BI), harnessing reporting and analysis software to unleash the power of information to all types of business usersDo everything in threes: three types of performance dashboards (i.e., operational, tactical, and strategic) each contain three types of applications (i.e., monitoring, analysis, and management) and three layers of information (i.e., graphical, multidimensional, and transactional)Moving from concept to reality, Performance Dashboards showcases each type of performance dashboard using a real-world example from Quicken Loans, International Truck and Engine Corporation, and Hewlett–Packard. These and other case studies show you how to build performance dashboards and what benefits they offer. Finally, Performance Dashboards synthesizes the tips and techniques from these case studies and leading practitioners in the field, showing you how to:Evaluate your company's organizational and technical readiness to undertake a successful performance dashboard projectCreate effective KPIs that change organizational behavior and improve performanceDesign powerful dashboard screens that communicate relevant facts quickly and conciselyIntegrate existing performance dashboards and metrics using a top-down or bottom-up approachAlign business and technical teams to deliver a scalable and sustainable solutionEvangelize a performance dashboard solution and ensure end-user adoptionWhether you are an executive looking to learn more about dashboards or scorecards, an IT professional needing to better understand how to implement dashboards, or a college student preparing for a career armed with the most cutting-edge thinking about how to improve organizational performance, Performance Dashboards is for you.