Role  :- 1)Strategic  2)Analytical  3)Operational

1.Dashboards for strategic purposes

The primary use of dashboards today is for strategic purposes. The popular “executive dashboard,” and

most of the dashboards that support managers at any level in an organization, are strategic in nature. They

provide the quick overview that decision makers need to monitor the health and opportunities of the

business.

Dashboards of this type focus on high‐level measures of performance, including forecasts to light

the path into the future. Although these measures can benefit from contextual information to clarify the

meaning, such as comparisons to targets and brief histories, along with simple evaluators of performance

(for example, good and bad), too much information of this type or too many subtle gradations can distract

from the primary and immediate goals of the strategic decision maker.

2. Dashboards for analytical purposes

Dashboards that support data analysis require a different design approach. In these cases the information

often demands greater context, such as rich comparisons, more extensive history, and subtler performance

evaluators. Like strategic dashboards, analytical dashboards also benefit from static snapshots of data that

are not constantly changing from one moment to the next. However, more sophisticated display media are

often useful for the analyst who must examine complex data and relationships and is willing to invest the

time needed to learn how they work. Analytical dashboards should support interactions with the data, such

as drilling down into the underlying details, to enable the exploration needed to make sense of itthat is, not

just to see what is going on but to examine the causes. For example, it isn’t enough to see that sales are

decreasing; when your purpose is analysis, you must be made aware of such patterns so that you can then

explore them to discover what is causing the decrease and how it might be corrected. The dashboard itself,

as a monitoring device that tells the analyst what to investigate, need not support all the subsequent

interactions directly, but it should link as seamlessly as possible to the means to analyze the data.

3.Dashboards for operational purposes

When dashboards are used to monitor operations, they must be designed differently from those that

support strategic decision making or data analysis. The characteristic of operations that uniquely influences

the design of dashboards most is their dynamic and immediate nature. When you monitor operations, you

must maintain awareness of activities and events that are constantly changing and might require attention

and response at a moment’s notice. If the robotic arm on the manufacturing assembly line that attaches

the car door to the chassis runs out of bolts, you can’t wait until the next day to become aware of the

problem and take action. Likewise, if traffic on your web site suddenly drops to half its normal level, you

want to be notified immediately.

As with strategic dashboards, the display media on operational dashboards must be very simple. In the

stressful event of an emergency that requires an immediate response, the meaning of the situation and the

appropriate responses must be extremely clear and simple, or mistakes will be made. In contrast to

strategic dashboards, operational dashboards must have the means to grab your attention immediately if

an operation falls outside the acceptable threshold of performance. Also, the information that appears on

operational dashboards is often more specific, providing a deeper level of detail. If a critical shipment is at

risk of missing its deadline, a high‐level statistic won’t do; you need to know the order number, who’s

handling it, and where it is in the warehouse. Details like these might appear automatically on an

operational dashboard, or they might be accessed by drilling down on or hovering the mouse over higher‐

level data, so interactivity is often useful.

The ways that dashboard design must take different forms in response to different roles are clearly worth

your attention. We’ll examine some of these differences in more detail in Chapter 8, Putting It All Together,

when we review several examples of what works and what doesn’t for various purposes.