Dashboard Example: Helpdesk Dashboard
Enterprise Dashboards are usually built by the IT department for a business unit to use in tracking their relevant metrics. It’s always interesting when we get to look at dashboards built by the IT folks for their own use. Here is a look at how the MIT information technology department uses a helpdesk dashboard to track how they are doing in terms of user support:
The user community at MIT is supported by the Information Services & Technology (IS&T) department. Back in 2002, they performed a study of the effectiveness of their IT services. Jointly with Stanford, they looked at the issues such as: “How are our IT investments performing? How can we use our IT systems to help manage ourselves better?” The first IT area selected for study was the IT Help Desk. The First Contact Dashboard was created and is still used today to monitor performance of MIT’s helpdesk support functions. As you can see from the enterprise dashboard screenshot, the primary measure is client satisfaction (an attribute that can be hard to quantify). At MIT, the individual components of client satisfaction are Availability, Communication, Resolution, Timeliness, Expertise and Professionalism. The KPIs are published on a weekly basis and distributed via pdf files. Available views include weekly, last six weeks, last three months, and last six months. Other miscellaneous statistics, typical of call centers and support operations, include calls, call length, abandonment rate, call wait times, cases, etc.
Homework: Getting involved with call center or help desk management? Start with these books on help desk management. Note: Hey, Dashboard Spies!: Do you know how smart you are getting by reading The Dashboard Spy? From pig production to airplane crew size optimization to monitoring presidential campaigns, we’ve examined enterprise dashboards from all aspects of business. I’ll do my share to keep snooping around for those elusive dashboard screenshots that keep this dashboard screenshot collection interesting.
More Homework: Study this passage from Malik on the cost factors of enterprise dashboards and tell me what you think:
DASHBOARD COST FACTORS
Like any other software initiative, a dashboard deployment tends to take ona life of its own as part of the organizational infrastructure. So, it is impor-tant to get a clear perspective on the total cost of ownership for an extendedperiod. The following are the main cost factors that must be considered for asuccessful dashboard solution:
• Software cost
• Annual support cost
• Additional hardware cost
• Initial deployment cost
• User training cost
• Ongoing support personnel cost
So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books on business dashboards.
PS: If you find yourself part of an enterprise dashboard effort, you must study Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise dashboards.
