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Pre-packaged dashboards or ad-hoc analysis: what's the best ?
When you provide pre-packaged dashboards, people want to be able to do ad-hoc analysis. When you give them a powerful BI tool for great ad hoc analysis..they want pre-packaged analysis.
the best answer is to provide both, of course.
In your own experience, how do you and your colleagues work to analyse & control your data? do you need pre-packaged dashboard first, or the means for ad-hoc analysis? Do you prefer general dashboards with general KPIs first or being able to customize your analysis with your own KPI?
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7 Answers
It's a conundrum, for sure! I like to be able to go either way, depending on the personality trait of the person(s) wanting a dashboard. If there's any hesitation at all, I provide a quick set of a dozen metrics, using the balanced scorecard framework to get the juices flowing. If they hate something that I've provided, then hurrah, they will have something they prefer more.
Also, linking all of this to a pay-for-performance compensation methodology makes people sit up and get involved!
While everyone wants their cake and eat it to what i have found time and time again tends to be a stepped approach. The dashboard should always come first since it gives everyone a common set of metrics of which to base performance on. Without fail however after several weeks of using the dashboard users will want to chop up some of those metrics with ad-hoc in order to analyze how to increase the sub-metrics.
If you supply ad-hoc at first different people will begin basing their analysis off different criteria which makes a useful dashboard more difficult to create.
In the enterprise management/monitoring world, I find preconfigured dashboards that show key performance indicators based on some set of best practices are necessary for most customers. Even with the ability to run custom reports and create custom dashboards, providing a starting set of predefined dashboards is critical to success.
I would definitely have to say that it is both.Dashboards are great to get a quick pulse of what is going on in the business and to raise opportunities; however, additional Ad Hoc Analysis may be needed to take a deep dive into the root causes.
I would also state that the Dashboard should be a combination of standardized KPI's and custom KPI's. There is not going to be one out of the box solution that applies to all businesses because each is unique, so have the ability to customize is a key feature.
Finally, It may take several iterations of Ad Hoc Reporting and Analysis to truly determine what the Dashboard will look like.
in my experience business dashboards and ad-hoc analysis are two different things. Of course, they are connected (the same data source for example), but they target different audience. (Dashboards for management to monitor - answers the what and how question, Ad hoc analysis for analyzers to answer on why question)
Today almost everyone claims that they have a business dashboard, but very few can or do define them. If you have 4 panels on your screen with 3 charts and 1 table it doesn't mean that you have a dashboard. If you are displaying only the most crucial business informations in visually intelligent way (that is, in the way to help observer to monitor what is going on), then you may have a dashboard.
Data Analysis on the other hand should serve as source of more detailed information.
With Ad hoc reporting, users can address complex "on-the-fly" business questions because the ENTIRE data set in accessible in each report. With pivot tables, only a subset of data is generally supported requiring custom development and complex queries. Flexibility is key! Ad hoc reporting lets you create your reports instantaneously with simple customization, NOT limiting you to a "one size fit" all type dashboards.
Thank you all for your comments. You might be interested to see a post with a compilation of all the ideas gathered on this topic. You can access it here http://bit.ly/h7z09W
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