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 know and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming “must-haves” for all enterprises. Simple-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically well loved.

Steps we take when making a CIO dashboard (example):

1. Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that need to be measured in your dashboard.
2. Map KPIs to specific data requirements. Determine if the data exists in systems or needs to be collected.
3. If data-collection gaps exist, explore improvements to fill holes. Develop a plot and timeline to implement those systems.
4. Investigate business service management, project and portfolio management, and BI tools based on your KPI requirements. Pay attention to how tools integrate with your existing infrastructure.
5. Budget for the initial cost of the CIO dashboard, annual maintenance, and fees to implement the system. Take into account the complexity and cost of changes and updates.
6. Develop an implementation plot that provides dashboard visibility into key systems one at a time.
7. After systems are integrated, focus on correlating data across those systems to provide meaningful visual information and alerting capabilities should a metric violate a threshold.
8. When new components are considered, evaluate how they’ll be integrated into the dashboard.