Please tune in to Killer Business Performance Dashboards. Lots of great and fun content on the way for kids of all ages.
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Indeed, the car dashboard analogy is used extensively in the business performance dashboard business. In my quest to create meaningful, valuable dashboards, I must always keep an open mind. While I thought the business tachometer is a good idea, and maybe it is ok, I must take heed of Dr. Nicholas Bissantz’s critique of the car metaphor. http://blog.bissantz.com/tachometer
Dr. Bissantz’s work is extraordinary. I will be adding sparklines to my list of graphs to work on. http://www.bissantz.com/sparklines/index.asp
Because the car dashboard metaphor is still ubiquitous in the business performance dashboard world, dials and guages will for the time being will remain as a dashboard component widget just as pie charts and bar charts are still used. However, killer business performance dashboards must adopt sparklines.
The following statement summarizes the calculation needed to measure underwriting speed for a single application: the date/time underwriting results are returned , dt 2 minus the date/time the application was received by the underwriter , dt 1, equals the time to perform the underwriting. Speed of underwriting, U, can be measured in terms of days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Presumably, the date values are fields in a database or field s that can be calculated from a transaction database during a transformation.
The equation for each insurance application is this dt 2 – dt 1 = U .
The average speed , the average of U, is the total of all the time spent underwriting divided by the number of applications , n, sent to underwriting. A pseudo-code formu l a l ooks like this:
SUM n( U )/ n= avgU.
That is a way of finding the average for all applications. Now, the dimensions must be defined. What types and groups should be aggregated and averaged? For example, insurance type (life, health, home), applicant characteristics, geography, underwriter, agent are all dimensions that can be measured. Therefore, the dashboard will need to be drillable and support online analytical processing, OLAP.
So far we have the speed of underwriting, U, defined as time it takes from the underwriter receiving the application to the underwriting results being delivered to the agent. The key performance indicator then is the average underwriting speed of all, or groups of , applications. Therefore, on a killer business performance dashboard for the insurance industry there are these two components- the current speed communicated by a speedometer and speed over time communicated by a line graph. The speedometer is operational- it tells the manager the current average speed of underwriting, defined within the desired dimensions. The line chart is tactical- it is trend line, showing the manager the average speed over a given time range within desired dimensions.
By measuring speed over time, the killer business performance dashboard measures the acceleration, or deceleration, of underwriting speed. What causes acceleration of underwriting speed? Process improvements and process innovations cause acceleration of underwriting speed. By measuring the rate of change of underwriting speed, underwriting acceleration, managers can monitor the effects of process improvements and innovations.
In the case presented here, the dashboard will calculate the acceleration by computing the rate of change of U over a period of time. The killer business performance dashboard calculates and displays insurance underwriting acceleration and enables managers to monitor process improvements.
The killer business performance dashboard displays process improvement and process innovation monitoring with tachometers. For more on business tachometers, read Greg Marvin’s blog here-http://g regwmarvin.wordpress.com/. The insurance industry killer business performance dashboard displays an underwriting tachometer. The tachometer is drillable in order to display the acceleration of desired dimensions.
Killer business performance dashboards for the insurance industry also displays these KPIs in ways analogous to the speed of underwriting.
Integrated with Killer Balanced Scorecoards and the 24 Ways, Killer business performance dashboards for the insurance industry enables managers to monitor and act upon operational, tactical, and strategic knowledge. For more information on killer business performance dashboards, visit www.spectrumknowledgesystems.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfC-nu4dBEA
Frank told me …
Why do things break down? Are there predictable patterns in malfunctions that can be expressed in terms of mercury retrograde? My personal experience says yes. So do the headlines.
http://www.astrologyweekly.com/astrology-articles/mercury-retrograde.php
http://www.itsecurity.com/features/cable-cut-conspiracy-020708/
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/08/internet.outage/
http://ca.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idCAN1114968920080211
A car tachometer measures the speed of a machine shaft’s rotation. Basically, it measures the effort it takes to accelerate. The business tachometer displays the rate of change of a KPI, a KPI’s change over time. A way to measure the improvements of a process improvement or process innovation is by measuring the KPI’s rate of change. If you are familiar with Good to Great by Jim Collins, the tachometer is also a metaphor of the “flywheel”. www.jimcollins.com
I can’t find much use of the business tachometer in action online. There are plenty of references to the metaphor though. I am going to expand on the metaphor further in this post. The business tachometer differentiates Killer Performance Dashboards from other dashboards because it as a way of showing the effects of processs improvement and innovation. Therefore, a tachometer used this way is a strategic tool. See my blog on killer business performance dashboards for the insurance industry for a real life application.
A business tachometer measures the effects of process changes over time. If process improvement is measured in terms of faster, then a process has a speed. The speed of the process must be measured before and after the improvement. Measuring the rate of change of the speed measures the impact and can be used to determine the success rate of a process improvement. Killer business performance dashboards displays rates of change as a tachometer.
John Myers makes the metaphor clear on his blog -
http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/myers/archives/2007/01/introduction_to.php
Here is how Alan G. Badey and John P. Bryan use the business performance dashboard analogy and define a business tachometer.
The analogy to a car’s dashboard is a good one. When you’re driving, you can take a quick glance at the speedometer to see how fast you’re going, at the fuel gauge to find out how much gas is in the tank, and at the tachometer to learn how hard the engine is working. Imagine how convenient it would be to see real-time information on how fast your sales are growing, how much cash you have on hand (any company’s fuel), and what your business’s production utilization rates are (a company’s tach).
(http://www.nyreport.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Feature.showFeature&FeatureID=382)
Dale Long uses the business tachometer metaphor in his article on business performance dashboards
Many cars also have a tachometer, which displays the rate of rotation of the engine’s crankshaft. It typically has markings indicating a safe range of rotation speeds. While this readout may be mainly of interest to drivers with manual transmissions, it can also be an indication of how efficiently your engine is running. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OBA/is_4_25/ai_n21130436)
Wavefields. Now we are talking killer app!
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002vW&topic_id=1
Sparklines are very interesting. They were invented by Edward Tufte http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1
http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/guests/intro_to_cycle_plots.pdf
In the article above, Naomi B. Robbins explains cycle plots.
The link below is java source code for rendering HEAT maps.
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~beck0778/heatMap/heatMap.html
NASDAQ using Java to create a heat map application.
http://screening.nasdaq.com/heatmaps/heatmap_100.asp
Below is a DNA array reflecting gene expression values in several conditions.
Below is the outline for a complete episode of “Killer Performance Dashboards”. Much of the outline is standard content. Because this is basically an infomercial designed to generate leads, much of the content will be the “webmercial”. I will begin standard content with a $. In each Killer Performance Dashboard video there will be standard content and a portion of the value content. Our goal will be to provide valuable nuggets of knowledge, keeping it useful, but also not giving up too much expertise for free. The point is to generate leads to my website and for people to ask me to help them with their performance dashboards.
Using the video is a great way to pre-qualify clients, because the Killer Performance Dashboard will be built in using Pentaho Business Intelligence. If someone is using another tool, or is not open to commercial open source, then there are other solutions for them. However, I would hope that anyone who enjoys the Killer Performance Dashboard videos will trust I can help them get any kind of dashboard built. That is the second goal of the video series. The third goal is to generate enough interest that Killer Performance Dashhboard videos becomes the standard knowledge base for Pentaho subscribers. C3PO/R2D2 xoO
Creating dashboard components- Functions.
$The Evolution of Reporting
$-The Old Way
$-The New Way
$Introduction to Pentaho Reporting
$-Open source BI
$-Entire BI stack
$-Alphabet soup of standards
$-Pentaho Reporting slide
$Why Pentaho Report Designer
$-Slides pages 9-14
$-Report Wizard
-$database connectivity
$-list of report designer capabilities
Create a report
-Query Designer
-Add the dataset
-Field types
-image fields (AV, FM, UHF, AM, STP, Alien Telegraphing)
-Drawable Fields
-create the base report
F unctions
$-What functions can do (slide on page 3
$-Complete set of functions reference guide
$-Function properties
$ -distinct
$ -common
$ -name- use it like a variable
$ -dependency level- keep the default at zero
$-Elements and fields (slide page 4)
$-Function teaser
$ -color functions
$-visibility function
$-boolean functions
$-duplicate suppression and row banding
$-hyperlinking
Charts
$Chart introduction
$Chart building concepts
$Chart teaser- flash examples on screen
Create a CategorySetCollector Functions
-define group and resetgroup properties
Create a bar/pie chart expression(slides)
Save the chart
$Saving options teaser
Dashboarding points
File directory structure
Report XML File
xaction file
