Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

Dear T_Squared

By the way, is your forum name T x T (Or T^2)?! Where does it come from and what’s your real name?

Dashboards are simply a graphical representation of a report, any report, which by their pictorial nature are able to convey vital or important information to users at a glance – rather in the way that an automobile’s gauges and speedo are a highly visual means of showing the driver its speed, engine revs, oil pressure and so on.

In essence, they are graphics, hopefully changing in real time, which represent reports derived from the data you hold in your sales, marketing and ERP systems. If the data in a report is updated in real time as new figures arrive, then the dashboard will show how this data is changing, often in comparison to set targets, limits and other metrics.

If you have live data in your systems and someone who can write a dynamic (Always Changing) report, then you can represent this report on a dashboard, rather than as a column of figures.

An excellent analogy is to show a graph of sales performance figures from the bookings in the accounts system alongside the ongoing target by taking figures from the order booking system and comparing them to the figure for the target which should have been reached today. The graph thus represented shows a visually clear representation of how well the company is performing on that measure and the task is no more complex that getting a spreadsheet to draw a graph from the two columns of figures involved.

Dashboards can represent any set of metrics and show them against any fixed or moving targets or other metrics. The graphical representation and the choice of variable you wish to display are a matter of choice and should be decided on from a careful determination of what representations will be most valuable to the intended audience.

It’s not much use asking a Finance Director to guide you as to the data to represent as they can usually “picture” any combination of columns, rows and cross-tabs from a spreadsheet in their heads. They are in fact a walking personal dashboard. What you are seeking to do is to find the key data which impact upon your business, work out how to extract it and then, more importantly, how to represent it to people who wouldn’t have much of a clue as to what the raw figures meant.

So my questions are;

On what system(s) do you keep your data?
What form is the data kept in?
What manipulations do you wish to subject the data too?
What messages do you want to convey to the users?
What management or motivational function do you want it to achieve?
How will you update the underlying data such that the representation in the dashboard is always up-to-date?

Most company data is kept in databases and spreadsheets and the actual format of the data effects only the mechanics of turning it into a graphical representation.

Once you have access to your data (Accounts, CRM system, Marketing Campaign System, ERP system etc) then you need to find someone who is able to write reports. Crystal Reports is an industry standard these days as it can whip data from many sources and plonk it into the same table. The dashboard graphics follow from the same package. Likewise, CRM systems such as Maximizer Enterprise and forcasting systems such as SalesVision have a dashboard capabilities which allows the user to construct as many HTML dashboard representations from data held in Maximizer or Sales Vision, other systems, SQL Tables and spreadsheets. The HTML structure is so that it can be broadcast over an internet from a report server.

Nest you have to treat the data mathematically or statistically to ensure that it is always consistent and relevant to the task you have set.

Next you need to write your graphical interface so that the data – live data with any luck – can be plugged into the dashboard and the pretty pictures can be made available on everyone’s screen. You also have to work out how to distribute it unless you have

It is a myth that there are often whole departments maintaining dashboards. Once you have decided what data you want to use, what treatments you want to put it through, how you wish to represent it and to whom, then the development stage is over. The dashboard data maintains itself by being updated from the various systems and the dashboard itself only requires further work when you wish to display further parameters, add different visualisations and to change representations which have shown themselves liable to misinterpretation.

My favourite dashboard story was when I had a client who was a finance director who insisted on using his own vast spreadsheet, filled with macros and formulae for forecasting. It was sophisticated mathematical nonsense as he was attempting to predict the future by continuously predicting what would happen tomorrow. And then the next day from tomorrow’s prediction and so on. i.e., it was iterative.

He was smart enough to realise that you couldn’t just keep adding items to sales growth without constraints and feedback, otherwise our output would grow like Fibonacci’s rabbit population, covering the earth to a depth of a mile and expanding outwards at a speed greater than the speed of light! So he used negative feedback and non linear equations to tell me with confidence what he predicted we would be targeting for sales in 8 months time.

As he couldn’t at the time grasp chaos dynamics and strange attractors, (He was very much a Newtonian Determinist) I put his equations into a model and graphically represented the result in a dashboard graphic. It was very, very Scientific American!

We got a figure which is called a strange attractor and he could look at the trajectory of his forecast as it whanged into this “Ball of mathematical string” fully in keeping with the expectations he’d laid down in his mega-equations. What he couldn’t understand was that his predictions came out of the attractor in almost any direction other than that which he’d planned. I proved the maths and I proved model and the the representation and then I showed him that the odd directions our company was predicted to go from his model was down to the actual day to day conditions and values in reality differing ever so slightly from the figures in his model, such that when you chucked them into a strange attractor, you had no idea about which direction they would come out in unless you could determine the figures with which they went in to the thing to an infinite accuracy. Sales figures and projections are not notoriously correct to 10%, never mind, 0.0000000000001%!

That “ball of mathematical string” was the weirdest dashboard picture I’ve ever used and became a bit of an in house icon. I gained an ally in the FD and he worked out how to do his forecasting through the sum total of his staff’s sales insights moderated by some hefty econometrics, clever statistics and historical projections.

It rather explains why I’m majoring in forecasting new.

Could I ask you for the answers to the questions and I’ll endeavour to of whatever further assistance I can.


Sincerely

Steve Alker
SalesVision

Wow - great answer from Steve.

Let me draw your attention to two further resources that you may find helpful:

1) The Dashboard Spy - a blog which captures lots of example dashboard info - https://dashboardspy.com/

2) Visual Business Intelligence - a blog focusing on how to visualise data in a clear and concise manner - https://perceptualedge.com/blog/

Both offer a different take on what makes a successful dashboard.

John

Hi T_Squared...

Have you had a look at this site:

https://www.marketingnpv.com/

Good luck,
Bob

Dear TT,

I would be the last to argue math does not matter for a dashboard (I specialize in estimating econometric models to ensure your dashboard metrics are leading performance indicators), but also believe you can do a lot for your company without it! The first stage in building dashboard is finding out what the key business goals are (in the minds of the owner or CEO) and then ensuring the marketing department works towards these goals. Most experts I know estimate this math-free stage brings in about half of the full dollar benefit from building dashboards! As for the next stage, you do not need to be a mechanic to drive a car, so outsourcing the math makes sense. If you want to find out more, feel free to contact me,

Cheers