Making Portal Dashboards Work

Corporations became early adopters of portal dashboards as stakeholder buy-in, a common vision, and other portal priorities took precedence over dashboard construction.

If you are considering developing a portal dashboard, we recommend the following:

  • Understand the market and business issues associated with portal dashboards. Dashboards require a unique methodology, so best practices are critical and first-time success is unlikely without experienced resources. Take advantage of some of the early lessons learned from the good, and not-so-good portal dashboards that have emerged from early adopters.
  • Commit to a process-centric approach to your dashboard design, where measures have contextual relevance to users' roles and jobs.
  • Evaluate the tools available to you and consider the Data Warehousing (DW) capabilities of your ERP. In many cases, we've seen valuable dashboards emerge that use the ERP tools and licenses that your company may already have in place.
  • Develop a quick portal dashboard proof-of-concept using a pilot business function and a representative group of end users.
  • Keep the project scope focused and limited, whether you're doing a prototype or full release. Dashboards have the potential to get away from you and seriously jeopardize an otherwise successful effort. Stay in scope.
  • Maximize existing resources. Data assets exist in legacy systems and most companies have ERP data warehouse systems (such as SAP BW) with very robust capabilities. If a discrete pilot group is identified (such as all sales managers in the Northeast), a first release can likely be created with readily available assets.
  • Earlier value is better. A thoughtful approach to dashboards doesn't mean a long, laborious design and development cycle. An early-release dashboard can create excitement, generate momentum and provide a clever and intuitive design that can be quickly iterated. Generally speaking, you can get a first phase dashboard up and running within three months.

When it comes to adding business analytics to your portal, think "value to the business, and value to the user" and you will find a portal dashboard project that will quickly provide its return on investment.

Learn more about some of the thought leadership that one can expect built into an LDS portal solution.