Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 14

How to Deploy and Integrate Dashboards

Where to Start and Finish?

Quest for Alignment

One common question that people ask about performance dashboards is “What’s the best place to start?” And the follow-up question is “How do we integrate our existing performance dashboards?”

Most people start their performance dashboard journey with a request from the chief executive officer (CEO) or business unit head who wants an executive dashboard. But many question whether a centralized, top-down approach is politically feasible and technically practical. They wonder whether it would be better to let performance dashboards bubble up from the bottom and integrate them after the fact. Many wonder whether they should tackle an important application that is critical to the company’s success or start small to minimize complexity and risk.

Multiple Starting Points. Ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer to these questions. Organizations employ both top-down and bottom-up approaches, often at the same time. For example, executives may have kicked off a balanced scorecard project that promises to cascade scorecards from the executive suite to all levels of the organization, while, at the same time, each functional group is building its own operational and tactical dashboards. There may also be an enterprise business intelligence (BI) initiative whose goal is to standardize the delivery of information across the enterprise, providing both executive and departmental reports ...