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Enterprise Dashboard Article - War Room Approach to Executive Dashboards: Bringing Users & IT Together

Dashboard Spy readers - here is another research clip I saved while browsing through a news database. Interesting enterprise dashboard article on the best process to use to align business users and IT personnel before and during an enterprise dashboard project. It’s called The War Room Approach. Thanks for the feedback on the previous executive dashboard article clip by the way. I was told by many of you that it would be nice to get plenty of business dashboard-related articles to browse through. Some of the articles are quite hard to find on one’s own on the web. These come through searches done on various commercial and academic reference databases.

Tags: Digital Dashboard Implementation, Enterprise Dashboard, Excel Dashboards, Business Intelligence Dashboards, Executive Dashboard Project, War room approach, KPI, Metrics

The War Room Approach To Dashboards; Bringing Business Users and IT Together Creates Balance
Working with IT
By Mark Piro
1174 Words
1 March 2006
Business Intelligence Review
19
Vol. 2, No. 1
English
2006 Business Intelligence Review and SourceMedia Inc. All rights reserved.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at a major BI vendor’s international user conference. My subject was a case study on the good, bad and ugly of an enterprise dashboard project. In the spirit of “knowing your audience,” I polled the attendees to see how many people described themselves as technical (using jargon to help classify themselves). About two-thirds of the 400 attendees raised their hands (after all, this was a BI tool conference). The balance of the audience described themselves as business users with minimal technical background. I then asked how many of this latter group felt they were not getting the dashboarding functionality they needed. Nearly all the business users enthusiastically acknowledged this fact. This was not a revelation, just a reflection of the challenges of deploying enterprise dashboard systems that balance the needs of business users and the IT groups that support them.

With enough time and money any company can develop and deploy a successful dashboard. There may be several design iterations to get it right, and throughout the process, challenges include finger pointing, source data gaps, data quality issues, management changes and even temporary loss of sponsorship. I can name several companies today that have very impressive dashboards, all of which have equally compelling horror stories involving squandered time and budget. This is where BI professionals and their counterparts can do better.

The following describes the necessary pre-conditions and initial steps in the design process aimed at correctly engaging IT and reducing redesign iterations. This process was put into practice with several client projects and has been informally referred to by those involved as the “The War Room Approach.” This name is borrowed from military and aerospace industry practices where an acute focus on a multidiscipline concept is required for days, weeks, or months. This approach is not new to anyone who has correctly executed a Joint Application Development (JAD) or Rapid Application Development (RAD) session. The difference here is in the preparation, the mix of people, and the facilitation.

Dashboard Project Pre-Conditions

A dashboard, pure and simple, is a business-centric function enabled by technology. Therefore, business users must be involved in this initiative. A lack of business participation increases the risk of a dashboard solution skewed by unnecessary BI tool features and functions. The result will be a dashboard with little traction among users.

I have a client who reacted very negatively to those sexy speed dials when she saw the first iteration of her dashboard. No one bothered to truly vet the concept with her. Of course it is critical that IT is engaged and leads key technical tasks, but business users must get in front of the project and drive it. This is easier said than done in cases where IT organizations are powerful entities that peg business users as inarticulate participants. At a minimum, business users must champion and help lead the design process in order to ensure their needs are represented. Such ownership gives a dashboard a reasonable chance for success.

War Room Preparation

The first iteration of a dashboard should “pave the cow path,” meaning it must be simple in its design. Think about your first success being the representation of your existing reports, KPIs and analysis related activities on the dashboard. Of course, there may be a brand new wiz-bang report that a key user or business sponsor has to see. The point here is that the first release of a dashboard should have enough “legacy” elements to initially attract the user and ease them into full acceptance as new functionality is introduced, such as graphics, triggers, alerts, forums and external links.

Ahead of this, business users need to apply meaningful thought to their reports, analytics, KPIs, etc. and develop a catalog with these items allocated to subject areas (sales, financials, inventory, etc.) and user types/roles (executive users, operation users, analyst, etc.). Preliminary thought should address the relationship of the reports to one other (referred to as “linkage”) and develop some sense of a hierarchy of reports. Finally, there should be a prioritization of reports, KPIs, etc., with respect to the importance to sponsors, criticality to operations, complexity, etc. This will help to crystallize aspects of the dashboard concept, including:

1. The visualization concept of the high level subject areas on a dashboard (this will translate later to tabs and screen real estate concepts);

2. The screen navigation of the dashboard from subject area to subject area or report to report;

3. The prioritization of subject areas and reports for incremental development.

Note that there is no mention of technology in this process. This step is all about business users developing a framework in order to identify the appropriate enabling tools and technologies.

It is best for business users to share any preliminary outcome of the above three aspects with IT sooner rather than later. This will help IT with its own preparation in areas that include:

1. High-level requirements for sourcing required data;

2. High-level design requirements of underlying data structures;

3. A sense of what can and can’t be delivered by the dashboard tool/platform.

War Room Execution

Beginning with the end in mind, participants in the war room need to collectively produce two key deliverables. The first is a high-level dashboard concept with subject area definition, report/KPI linkages and hierarchies, roles, screen real estate allocations and a first cut at identifying miscellaneous dashboard functions (messages, alerts etc.). Second, a high-level roadmap is needed to identify prioritized increments, a timeline, high-level tasks, milestones, deliverables and resources.

Participants should include champions from business and IT, business users from each subject area, a dashboard architect familiar with dashboard design concepts tools and technologies, and source data experts who can quickly put a reality check on the availability of data to support desired dashboard functionality. A popular killer of dashboard projects is limited availability of underlying data; therefore, it is imperative to have source data experts engaged at this stage to determine what is possible and when.

The duration of the war room exercise is typically three to four days. It is best to develop an agenda around deliverables and time box the activities. An experienced facilitator can help steer around “analysis paralysis,” keep the focus centered and the process moving.

The key takeaway is that careful war room preparation and execution are critical for success. By having business users and IT participating equally in the process, you will balance the needs of these primary constituencies, and deliver the critical mindshare and joint ownership required to make the dashboard concept a successful deployment that allows an organization to manage business more effectively.

Mark Piro, managing officer, business intelligence, at Adjoined Consulting, can be contacted at mpiroadjoined.com. (c) 2006 Business Intelligence Review and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.bireview.com/ http://www.sourcemedia.com/

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One Response to “Enterprise Dashboard Article - War Room Approach to Executive Dashboards: Bringing Users & IT Together”

  1. César Santomé López Said on June 10th, 2008 at 9:03 pm quote

    Thanks I´m looking for more information to design a wra room based in a process information platform

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Last Modified: Friday, November 24th, 2006 @ 10:32

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