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From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

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PerformancePoint Server Dashboards - BI or BS?

Dashboards at any price? We take as gospel the value of Business Intelligence. No one doubts the value of actionable intelligence or the guidance that a good decision support system brings. We let the fat cats up top dictate a direction and we hustle to implement a business intelligence system. We check the Gartner BI Magic Quadrant and peruse the vendor literature. We even check the trade magazines for reviews. Standard operating procedure, right?

Well, imagine my surprise the other day when I came across a magazine article that actually called into question whether a certain Performance Management system was really BI or BS. Talk about rocking the boat and upsetting the status quo. What happened to the usual cheerleading?

The article Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007: BI Worth the Price? calls into question the value that the $20,000 per server license brings. They quote skeptical IT managers who call the product the “magic 8 ball server”, the “Dilbert Point-Haired Boss Server” and “eye candy for managers”. Ouch!

Well let’s take a quick look at the so-called eye candy. Here are some screenshots of PerformancePoint Server dashboards thanks to the contribution of Dashboard Spy reader Todd.

performancepoint dashboard scorecard

performance point scorecard example

And here is the screenshot that got Todd upset initally (see his comment). It’s using the Excel add-in to provide the front end.

Excel dashboard powered by PerformancePoint server 2007

Let’s take a look at the product and see what it offers:

Performance Point Server 2007 is a performance management analysis server that provides balanced scorecards, dashboards, analytics, forecasting, planning budgeting and reporting.

It began life in 2004 as the Biz project and incorporated Business Scorecard Manager (BSM) in 2005. Microsoft acquired Proclarity Desktop for business analytics and rolled it all together in PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Of particular interest to us Dashboard Spies, it offers the Dashboard Designer. The 6 components of Dashboard Designer are:

Dashboards
KPIs
Scorecards
Reports
Data Sources
Indicators

I’m not going to pass judgement as to the proper pricing of the product. Take a look at the article and judge for yourself.

Tags: PerformancePoint Dashboard, PerformancePoint Server Dashboards

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3 Responses to “PerformancePoint Server Dashboards - BI or BS?”

Todd Kitta Said on March 10th, 2008 at 2:01 pm quote
I’m floored that you obviously have not done your research on this product. The screenshot you show is for PerformancePoint Planning, not PerformancePoint Monitoring & Analytics (basically 2 separate products with one price).

What you show is a planning worksheet, not a dashboard. PerformancePoint dashboards are solely delivered on the web through SharePoint.
admin Said on March 10th, 2008 at 2:44 pm quote
Yes - you are right. The screenshot there is using Excel as a front end. I’m still looking for an appropriate screenshot. Can you you send one? For some reason, I can’t get a hold of one. Thanks Mucho!!
Jason Volpe Said on May 26th, 2008 at 10:13 am quote
It’s unfortunate that people with this little information about a product have the ability to write articles about it. If anything, you’ve at least given me enough information I need to avoid this website knowing there’s little to no value to gain from it. It’s just too bad there are people who read it and “think” you know what you’re talking about, and make decisions (misinformed ones at best) based on what they read here.

Last Modified: Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 @ 11:42

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 8:31 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Dashboards by Example Volume 1 Goals and Objectives

"Dashboards By Example - BI Dashboard Samples" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

We strongly believe that the more dashboards you study, the more adept you will become at choosing correct design solutions for your company. "Learn by Example" is not just a motto - we take it literally, hence the name "Dashboards by Example". So take every chance you get to view examples of BI interfaces. As a matter of fact, take a second now, and study this dashboard example.

What's on your Dashboard?

The Dashboard Spy wants your dashboards!! I've collected over 1000 screenshots of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards for Volume 1 and now need you to send me the next 1000 dashboards for Volume 2. Email me at info at dashboardspy.com and tell me about your dashboard. Send me images, notes, technical details, business rules, metrics, KPIs, anything that you think your fellow Dashboard Spies will have an interest in. Keep this library of dashboarding resources going!

Also, I'd love more links to both the main Dashboard Spy site at http://dashboardspy.com and the Volume 1 blog of 1000 dashboards at http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com. I'd love your help in making these resources better known.

Looking forward to seeing your dashboards, The Dashboard Spy

P.S. Did you check out this free dashboard template for wireframing? Click on the image below for the download link and instructions. Consider it a gift for your unfailing support. Thank you very much. Sincerely, your friend in dashboarding, Dash.