Chapter 4. Scorecards and Dashboards – Information Visualization
The concept of scorecards and dashboards has become increasingly popular as organizations discovered their ability to communicate complex information. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but there are important distinctions between a scorecard and a dashboard.
While both scorecards and dashboards display performance information, a scorecard is a more prescriptive format; a true scorecard usually includes components such as perspectives (groupings of high-level strategic areas), objectives (verb-noun phrases pulled from a strategic plan), measures (attributes or metrics in our case), and stoplight indicators (red, yellow, or green status, which is managed by the thresholds in MicroStrategy).
Most dashboards are simply a series of graphs, charts, gauges, or other visual indicators that a user has chosen to monitor, some of which may or may not be strategically important.
Tip
Traditionally, the main difference between the...
Scorecards versus dashboards
The definition of a scorecard and a dashboard is now clear, but how do they look? Where do we start? When should we use a scorecard or a dashboard? There is no perfect answer to these questions; however, the rest of this chapter offers a practical guide to define the best option for your business needs.
A scorecard typically looks like the following screenshot:
A scorecard displays progress towards specific goals and performance measurements over time. It also validates the measures in order to take actions for corrections, that is, it outlines high-level grouping of data, such as region, year, and quarter using licensing and consulting revenue as a metric, along with the threshold to highlight spotlights.
A dashboard looks like the following screenshot:
This indicates the status of the analyzed data at a specific point in time. The best way to start designing is by identifying your specific business need.
The following table typifies the more common types of scorecards...
In this chapter, we learned how to transform our data into powerful scorecards and dashboards, from the business needs, functional design, and platform-driven configuration.
MicroStrategy offers a solid and easy-to-use platform. We highly recommend following the first steps prior to starting the configuration of the scorecard or dashboard: understand the business needs and follow the best practices. Dashboards and scorecards may turn out to be a very useful asset for organizations wanting to deploy a decision support system for any given business domain. Business domains such as financial and investment, insurance, healthcare, retail, and logistics may use the power of MicroStrategy Business Intelligence. Using this, executive users and business analysts can build dashboards and scorecards on their own. Business analysts can also share the reports with other business executives, or save it at the Shared reports location for use and collaboration by other users and analysts.
