Balanced Scorecards and Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel, 2nd Edition

Chapter 30

Publishing Balanced Scorecards and Dashboards

Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is collected and used.

—Dr. Carl Sagan

Astronomer, scientist, writer

1934–1996

Publishing your Balanced Scorecard or operational dashboards takes more thought than just sending out an e-mail or updating an Excel worksheet. Communicating your organization’s performance gap requires a vehicle that can handle the analytics while being easy to develop and maintain, maintaining the security of confidential data, producing portable content for traveling executives and managers, and having great presentation quality across multiple platforms.

There are many Business Intelligence (BI) tools and vendors, but the most widely used BI tool in corporate divisions and small- to midsized businesses continues to be Excel. Within this non-BI environment, three main methods of distribution are used for Balanced Scorecards and dashboards developed with Excel. Balanced Scorecards and dashboards can remain in Excel, with distribution through an e-mailed workbook, a shared folder on a network, or a portal such as Microsoft SharePoint. Two other methods of publishing and distribution are useful for Balanced Scorecards and collections of operational dashboards. In these methods, Microsoft PowerPoint or a PDF format is used to publish a static version of a scorecard or dashboard. The pages of output are linked ...