Dashboard Design and the Big 16

Each week I look forward to receiving a dashboard for my district at work.  I look forward to seeing how my store performs in comparison with the other ten stores, and reviewing with my team where we are succeeding and where we have opportunities.  But there is a lot of information on our dashboard, far more than what I consider the Big 4: sales, labor, Membership, and gift cards.  All of the information is presented in the same format, and some of the metrics are insignificant in terms of what actually matters for my annual performance review.  Kids Club conversion and email capture rates are interesting, but they have no bearing on my bonus or my raise, and while they contribute to success in the most critical areas, they don't drive my business like the Big 4 items do.  You can ask me at any point in the year how my team is performing in any of the most important areas, and I can tell you down one-hundreth of a percent.  Ask me how we're doing in any of the other twelve categories showcased on our dashboard, and I might be able to tell you if we're above or below goal.  I can focus on, and I can keep my team focused on, those four key areas every single day I'm at work, but sixteen balls in the air is more than most of us can juggle successfully.

My company has used various forms of dashboards over the years, and until this class, I hadn't really considered dashboards outside of the Barnes & Noble context.  However, this week's material opened my eyes to what a dashboard should aim to accomplish.  Peter McFadden, CEO of Excel Dashboard Widgets, defines a quality dashboard as "An easy to read, often single page [or single screen], real-time user interface, showing a graphical representation of the current status (snapshot) and historical trends of an organizations key performance indicators to enable instantaneous and informed decisions to be made at a glance."  Stephen Few, Principal of Perceptual Edge, similarly defines quality dashboards as "A visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more of the objectives consolidated and arranged on a single screen so that information can be monitored at a glance."

These definitions validated my opinion that we have too much clutter on our district dashboard.  Those extra twelve metrics might be interesting and worth sharing periodically, but all of the statistics associated with those areas can be accessed through our in-house Reporting Center, so they really just muddy the waters on our dashboard.  At the end of the day, our KPIs are exactly what I refer to as the Big Four, and that truly is the information that must be monitored at a glance.  Sales, labor, Memberships, and gift cards are so significant that effective Store Managers monitor the store's performance on an hourly basis.  The weekly snapshot helps me to determine if I need to put more energy into a particular area when compared with a neighboring store so it's productive and helps me decide where and how to spend my energy during a given week.  But the excessive attention to items that truly are not key performance indicators just dilutes the message.

Working with MicroStrategy this week was a useful assignment.  I actually checked out MicroStrategy's home page, and subscribed to the cloud platform that is available for free for one year.  After spending a bit of time exploring, I was surprised to receive a relatively personalized email from a CS Rep named Ed inquiring about my use of MicroStrategy.  I have signed up for a lot of "freemium" online services, but that is the first time I have been contacted by the provider.  While the assignment offered valuable learning points, I might have preferred an opportunity to rework my company's dashboard instead.  I could still do that on my own time at some point in the future, but using real data that matters and makes sense to me would take the assignment to a much more engaging level.  I realize that not all students use or even have access to a corporate dashboard with real data, so that presents a number of challenges in terms of actual execution.  For me it would be an incredibly valuable exercise, both academically and professionally, and the most exciting and useful parts of the MIS program occur when I discover a way to merge school and work for an assignment.  It's a form of practical application that leads to an understanding of the material that far surpasses case study exercises.

If I were to rework my district's dashboard, I would do so in light of Few's Common Pitfalls in Dashboard Design.  In addition to identifying mistakes that should be avoided in dashboard design, Few also asserts  what a dashboard should allow a user to do:

1. See the big picture
2. Focus in on the specific items of information that need attention
3. Quickly drill into additional information that is needed to take action

My weekly dashboard currently provides a big picture.  But sometimes we lose the forest for the trees, because there is just so much information on that single sheet of paper.  I know this to be true for several of my peers, who instead of looking at their sub-par Membership numbers and using that data to inform an action plan, will point to a non-critical metric such as email capture rate and point out that they perform above the company average.  Eliminating the noise from our dashboard would help Store Managers identify appropriate wins to celebrate and encourage them to take action where it really matters.  Point two directly ties into the first point because the excessive detail means that some users miss the specific items that need attention.  With regard to the final point, we can drill into additional information needed to take action from a separate program, not the dashboard itself.  Hopefully IT will find a way to link the two together in the future because it saves time, but having the ability to see the details at all is a vast improvement over where we were even seven years ago.

It appears that we are moving on to web and social media analytics now, so I may not find time to revisit my district dashboard before the end of this class.  However, my free subscription to MicroStrategy is good for one year, and I would like to see what I can do to improve the presentation of our KPIs.  I started calling the metrics that matter the Big 4 because my Regional VP has her own set of KPIs that she refers to as the Big 6.  I suspect that my district's dashboard is an attempt to implement something similar to what our VP uses, but we simply got carried away and created a visual display where nothing is important because everything is important.  Creating a streamlined version that is also visually appealing could be the perfect project to showcase my schoolwork on a professional level.

References

Few, S. (2005).  Dashboard design: Beyond meters, gauges, and traffic lights.  Business Intelligence Journal, 10(1), 18-24.

ProClarity Corporation.  (2006).  Common pitfalls in dashboard design.  Boise: Stephen Few.

Ram, S.  (2014).  Dashboard design and its use for analysis [PDF document].  Retrieved from https://blackboard.eller.arizona.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-521135-dt-content-rid-4449385_1/courses/MIS_587-910-142-MISO/Lecture_Notes/Lecture8.pdf