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John Porter - Bluenog Practice Director

Effective dashboard design should be approached with many of the same principles as good website design. An effective website delivers the right information to targeted groups of users with minimal effort on their part. The design of a good reporting dashboard seeks to hit a similar target. A dashboard serving the CEO of an enterprise will look and behave very differently from a dashboard meant to serve only a specific department within the company. Therefore the design of a dashboard for an executive measuring company performance against a set of strategic metrics will offer a different set of functionality and level of granularity than an operational dashboard measuring the real-time flow of call center metrics to a group supervisor. It is critical to provide the appropriate level of data abstraction based up on the role of the audience.

While well designed dashboards hold the potential to help executives, managers and front line workers make sense of complex operational data, they only tell part of the story. The complete picture can only be obtained once contextual, unstructured information is added to the mix.

Portal technology combined with the right level of reporting and analytics is an ideal pairing with which to meet these needs. Why couple a portal with reporting technology? True portal technology can tie the benefits of personalization, single sign-on and aggregation of unstructured content into the world of the reporting dashboard. Imagine being able to access documents, presentations and applications that all contain information related to the data displayed in the dashboard. A properly implemented portal knows the role of the user and their area of responsibility. It can combine this information along with dashboard and content metadata to provide a truly comprehensive view of organizational or departmental health. This design presents a very powerful mechanism for turning data into knowledge.

The operational insights gained by deploying hierarchical dashboards across multiple levels of the organization is further enhanced by transforming the information they provide into actionable knowledge. This can be accomplished in part by adding drill-down capabilities to ever more granular levels of detail. Actionable insight is ultimately achieved by linking contextually relevant documents and unstructured data alongside the dashboard display and providing a means to securely communicate and collaborate on findings between team members.

Portal technology coupled with a well thought out meta-data strategy is uniquely suited to take dashboard benefits to the next level. In upcoming posts I'll build on these concepts driving a comprehensive portal and reporting strategy.