Useful guide to implementing performance dashboards | Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and...

Best single book on business intelligence | Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business | Wayne W. Eckerson

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	• Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business Wayne W. Eckerson Wiley, 2005 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 22 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Very good, but not excellent

Performance Dashboards is an excellent book on creating performance dashboards, but it assumes that the reader is well versed in Performance Management practice. This book does not offer you the steps needed to create a performance management framework, but rather a methodology to build the dashboards.

To build effective performance dashboards, you will need to build extensive knowledge on performance management methodology first. Once the framwork is in place, you can grab this book and learn how to effectively build performance dashboards based on your organization's performance management framework.

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Useful guide to implementing performance dashboards

If your organization already has a good handle on internal data collection and information technology, researcher and consultant Wayne W. Eckerson says it's time to consider taking the next step: implementing performance dashboards. This entails using dashboard software applications to integrate information that follows your business processes with information on your strategic objectives to create a performance guide for employees' activities and priorities. Eckerson's handy book explores how dashboards can help your staffers make their everyday actions consistent with long-term organizational goals. Though the book is directed toward businesspeople who deal with information technology, getAbstract finds it perfectly useful for managers and executives who are generally interested in performance improvement initiatives.

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Best single book on business intelligence

This is the "one book on business intelligence" that I recommend to everyone. Wayne Eckerson has created a great book to address the current trendiness of performance management and enterprise dashboards. Eckerson takes a vendor-neutral stance and supports his assertions both with research and case studies. The book provides a comprehensive view of performance dashboards and their role in the organization. What I found particularly illuminating were two "big-idea" concepts that alone are worth the price of the book.

The first big idea is Eckerson's definition of a performance dashboard. While business and IT management may be inclined to define a performance dashboard as merely a high-level representation of Key Performance Indicators (KPI's), Eckerson describes a robust three-tier architecture. Using his definition, what is commonly known as the "dashboard" is only the tip of the iceberg. Wayne defines three categories of performance dashboards- operational, tactical, and strategic- each having a tiered three-layer architecture.

The second big idea is is contained in Chapters 4 & 5. Chapter 4 is entitled "Assessing Your Organizational Readiness" and defines criteria that an organization can use to assess their readiness to adopt performance dashboards. Chapter 5 is entitled "Assessing Your Technical Readiness" and presents a Business Intelligence Maturity Model. While "organizational readiness" addresses the entire organization, the "Business Intelligence Maturity Model" specifically addresses the IT organization's current position on the BIMM scale.

The book can either be read cover-to-cover or by choosing specific topics. As such, it can be a valuable read for IT professionals at all levels as well as business users, managers and executives. My hunch is that readers will be delighted with the new insights they glean, but frustrated with their ability to bring change to their organizations. But this book provides a common reference so organizations can establish consensus and move forward.

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It's okay

I think the author did a good job of writing on the topic but I really think this is another one of those 'hot' topics that everyone 'needs' to know about. I hate to break the news to everyone but successful companies do the same thing today that they did 100 years ago. The formula isn't that hard but the effort is. Sure it's useful to have a common dashboard that a company can work from but I'm starting to think the whole dashboard concept is a distraction just like ISO9000 and a host of other necessary business tools. In the end you need to be around the equipment, around the people, around the suppliers and around the customers. If you expect a dashboard to tell you what to do then you are missing the point. A dashboard isn't going to help GM, Ford or Chrylser. A dashboard isn't going to make people buy your product. I've been in hundreds of manufacturing plants and I find that most of the people in the office have no idea what goes on in the plants. How about walking around your own company? How about getting invested? People use terms like RFID, Supply Chain, Portals, etc but at the end of the day they don't mean a thing. It's all about the people. It's all about the strategy. You can look at all the stats you want during a football game (passer rating, rushing yards per attempt, sacks, etc) but in the end the only thing that matters is the score. And the only way you win that game is by being prepared and executing on the field. The best team doesn't always win but it will win more often than it loses.

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How to use information to energize your goals and strategy.

Modern corporations collect vast amounts of data. Unfortunately, they too often mistake having massive amounts of data for having useful and actionable information. They are not the same thing. Even when a company knows how to transform data into usable information, there are still steps left to take that that information and make it accessible and usable throughout the organization in a manageable and coordinated way.

Wayne Eckerson explains how to use performance dashboards to display information on screens that help people do their job, understand where they are against the company's strategic objectives and goals, and give them the ability to drill down into the data as required by their job. These screens should be designed to be simple to read and understand (he says they should be designed with for a 12 year old), but empowering for their users.

There are three broad types of performance dashboards: Operational, Tactical, and Strategic. These must be handled differently, and I think the author does a great job in explaining how you should implement these. Each type gets a case study of a company that shows the reasons and methods for the implementation.

This book is for more for technical types, but it should also be looked at by the business types involved with driving and supporting such an initiative. I also appreciated Eckerson's emphasis on the a thaw between the usual tensions between the IT and Business teams.

A helpful and useful book.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

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Tips, techniques, and trends on how to use dashboard technology to optimize business performance

Business performance management is a hot new management discipline that delivers tremendous value when supported by information technology. Through case studies and industry research, this book shows how leading companies are using performance dashboards to execute strategy, optimize business processes, and improve performance.

Wayne W. Eckerson (Hingham, MA) is the Director of Research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), the leading association of business intelligence and data warehousing professionals worldwide that provide high-quality, in-depth education, training, and research. He is a columnist for SearchCIO.com, DM Review, Application Development Trends, the Business Intelligence Journal, and TDWI Case Studies & Solution.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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