What's the benefit of having a 'real time dashboard' in a business intelligence solution?

Hi Caty,

A real time dashboard rather can backfire then help you in the business.

I have 2 main reasons to state this.

First, it leads to micromanagement because on first alarm you or someone else appears on stage trying to handle the situation from the managerial level. Yes, it seams that this is a good way to be secure all the things are going to go on a good way but this is also a good way to drive your colleagues crazy and kill and initiative in them.

It leads to a bunch of people who do only what is measured and try to comply to the procedures, no innovations, no personal interest or contribution can be expected from such colleagues.

Second, it is a good way to drive you crazy. If you have update of dashboard 2 time per day then you can say to yourself: ok before next update I have six hours so lets use this time block for ……

In case you never know when the dashboard is going to be updated you always keep one aye on it, god knows what can pop up so it is better to pay attention, which as a consequence have that your attention is split between monitoring a dashboard and doing what you do.

As a consequence you do not give yourself 100% to ongoing activity and business suffer.

Regards, Daniel

The key with dashboards is to always make sure they are tailored for both the specific business and the specific business user. For the majority of businesses and users a real time dashboard can simply be a distraction, but there are situations and particularly times when it can be a helpful tool (only as one of many) in driving business improvement and direction.

Dashboards can be great because of the 'magic stick effect' - just because a business knows that certain figures, metrics and performance are being measured, they improve. When people know they're being watched they perform.

But why real time? Well an example could be a company where 50% of their business is done on the last day of the month for some reason (to do with budgets, or the way processes are complete etc.). Various members of management will be wanting to see how sales, stock, production, logistics, phone calls are performing that day, to ensure there are no problems or sticking points, to be able to act immediately. Businesses involved in fast moving commodity prices may want particular figures live, to make a there and then decision.

Now, whilst dashboards in general are best for the big picture, trending etc. having some specific focus can be really useful. So you might be wanting to set an alert level on a fine detail to be able to act on it - cleanliness in a hospital that is derived from actual end user feedback for example. That doesn't have to be permanent, but a focus for the month.

The question then becomes; whether you simply use dashboards for the big picture, where daily or even weekly is fine and use some other mechanism; active alerts through SMS or email; for notifying management of real issues, or whether all the detail and alerting is done through the dashboard - via drilldowns, pop ups, sounds and alerts. In the near future those 'dashboards' will be carried everywhere in your pocket, where at the touch of a screen you can see all the data you need to and be alerted whenever there is a problem - or maybe we're there now...

Having a "real time" business dashboard can be nice, but it is not essential. There are some other points that dashboards have to fulfil in order to be truly benefitial. Being "real time" is just nice-to-have feature because dashboars are not operational reports, their purpose is performance/trend monitoring.
The best way to implement a dashboard is to place everything on one screen only; that way, user has no need to compare data from different pages at the same time. Furthermore, dashboards show dense business information on small spatial space that communicates unambiguously, simply and rapidly. For all that, it is important that dashboards follow the best practices rules of visual design.
In some special cases only it could be important that dashboards are real-time, or that they represent data in real-time. That functionality can be implemented via some sort of alerts, but I still think that it is safer to send situation-triggered emails if fast reaction is a must in that case.

Again, it depends on what you are trying to measure and accomplish. However, most of the time real time is unnecessary when measuring behavior of the workforce and can create tension and consternation from the employees and can cause a loss of creativity, ingenuity, and motivation. A company most often would be better off focusing on building the right culture, values, metrics, desired outcomes, and right behavior than micromanaging with a live dashboard. If the outcomes are not right then engage the persons doing the actual work to fix the problem and get things back on track. Then get out of the way again and let them work. When using a real time dashboard to control behavior it will most often backfire.

On the other hand I can think of instances when immediate feedback can be cruical. For example, a nuclear plant that begins to overheat, a donut restaurant that replenishes from an offsite kitchen based on sales volume and types of donuts sold, temperatures in ovens of a food product manufacturer, a passenger jet that begins losing pressure or flaps cease to work, etc. These are designed more to control/monitor a process than behavior of the workers and in cases like this a real time dashboard can be crucial.

As I started out - It Depends!!!