Enterprise Dashboard Digest

Enterprise dashboard programmers sometimes deal with issues involving how best to portray real-time data. Most often, dashboards display information that is read from data warehouses that are refreshed during a nightly batch process. Transactional data that is presented in real time raises the complexity of the system. Here is a look at the ultimate real-time reporting of metrics. Literally, this is a real-time performance dashboard.

Us enterprise dashboard implementation types are visually-oriented people, right? Ok, then here is a little executive dashboard game the Dashboard Spy would like you to try.

Take a look at this picture: It’s a shot of business users hard at work with their executive dashboards, isn’t it? Or is it?

OK, so let’s pan the camera up a little to see their computer screens. Hey, maybe we’ll even be able to sneak a look at their enterprise dashboard screens?

Nice little setup, isn’t it? But the location seems unusual. Are these executive dashboard users outside? Let’s pan out some more and see what is going on. Wait a minute. This looks like a mobile control center or something. This is some setup. Eight work stations with multiple screens and video feeds – all running real-time business intelligence software that displays data via enterprise dashboard-style front-ends:

Now let’s see what they are so intently monitoring. Is it some critical enterprise event? No, it’s the performance of a formula 1 race team:

In real time, the performance dashboard makes possible lighting-fast evaluations of hundreds of metrics and decides within seconds whether or not to make pit stops and other decisions. Information is gathered at the race track and relayed to a business intelligence center where the decision processing is done. This leads to a clear advantage:

If you think I am pulling your leg, take a look at the Time Magazine article entitled: “Very Rapid Response – What can business learn from auto racing? Split-second decision making, says a British tech firm”.

Here is an excerpt from this excellent article:

When the caution flag comes out in Formula One racing, crews typically use the opportunity to bring their cars in for a pit stop. But when yellow came out in the 25th lap of last year’s Monaco Grand Prix, Team McLaren Mercedes made the counterintuitive decision to keep driver Kimi Raikkonen on the track. The ploy worked; Raikkonen won. But the decision wasn’t made at trackside. It came from team leaders based at the McLaren Technology Center in leafy Woking, south of London, who were using prediction software they had developed to help them make split-second tactical decisions in a sport in which speed is king.

All F1 teams have their own versions of software that analyzes thousands of variables–from weather and road conditions to fuel levels and competitors’ probable actions–and how they may interact to affect a car’s performance, before and during a race. The program spits out possible options and assesses the chances of success. Now that racetrack technology is coming to the equally fast-paced world of business.

McLaren and its partner, British software company SmithBayes Ltd., are launching a business version of the team’s “decision-engine” software, designed to help companies that face countless variables and constant volatility. “Businesses make a lot of strategic decisions that involve uncertainties this software can track,” says Simon Williams, ceo of SmithBayes.

Companies can use the software to measure the risks and rewards of moving into new markets and products or making capital investments. Myriad data and assumptions can be plugged in: competing technologies, changes in government regulations, what rivals may do. The one constant most businesses can count on is churn. “If you know something to be true, it’s already history,” Williams says. Prediction software, he argues, makes it easier for executives to “accept uncertainty and move on.”

It also helps companies practice “strategic agility,” a popular management theory endorsed by Donald Sull, a management expert at the London Business School. He argues that chaotic working environments frequently harbor hidden opportunities. “You successfully compete by consistently identifying opportunities and threats and reacting before your rivals,” Sull explains. Team McLaren, for example, had just 10 seconds to make its decision.

Interesting article. Definitely worth reading the whole article. Hope you found this post interesting too. Was the game too silly?

Tags: Enterprise Dashboard, Executive Dashboard, Rapid Decision Support System

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