Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business (Hardcover)

by Wayne W. Eckerson (Author) "This summer I found my 11-year-old son, Harry, and his best pal, Jake, kneeling side by side in our driveway, peering intensely at the pavement..." (more)
Key Phrases: tactical dashboards, formance dashboard, strategic dashboard, Hewlett Packard, Quicken Loans, Wayne Eckerson (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Tips, techniques, and trends on how to use dashboard technology to optimize business performance

Business performance management is a hot new management discipline that delivers tremendous value when supported by information technology. Through case studies and industry research, this book shows how leading companies are using performance dashboards to execute strategy, optimize business processes, and improve performance.

Wayne W. Eckerson (Hingham, MA) is the Director of Research for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), the leading association of business intelligence and data warehousing professionals worldwide that provide high-quality, in-depth education, training, and research. He is a columnist for SearchCIO.com, DM Review, Application Development Trends, the Business Intelligence Journal, and TDWI Case Studies & Solution.

From the Inside Flap
Performance dashboards are rapidly becoming the preferred way that business professionals view and analyze information about the performance of their business and the activities they manage. In a nutshell, performance dashboards let busy executives, managers, and staff view the performance of key business metrics at a glance and then move swiftly through successive layers of actionable information in a carefully guided manner, so they get the insight they need to solve problems quickly, efficiently, and effectively. By helping business people keep a pulse on their business and chart progress towards meeting strategic and tactical objectives, performance dashboards are becoming powerful agents of organizational change.

In Performance Dashboards, author Wayne Eckerson shows how performance dashboards focus business people on the right things to do and doing things right. As Director of Research and Services for The Data Warehousing Institute, a worldwide association of business intelligence professionals, Eckerson interviewed dozens of organizations that have built various types of performance dashboards in different industries and lines of business. His practical insights provide a road map to help you turbo-charge performance–management initiatives with dashboard technology to optimize performance and accelerate results.

Performance Dashboards addresses common questions that business professionals ask about performance dashboards, such as: What's the difference between dashboards and scorecards? How do I design performance dashboards to handle operational, tactical, and strategic processes? How do I create effective KPIs that drive organizational change and display them in an optimal fashion? Do I build performance dashboards from the top down or bottom up? What political obstacles will I encounter when launching a performance dashboard project and how do I overcome them?

Performance Dashboards clears up much of the confusion and answers your most critical questions. It starts by laying a conceptual foundation, showing how performance dashboards:

• Fit into the larger context of business performance management (BPM), an emerging discipline for linking strategy and performance
• Represent the "new face" of business intelligence (BI), harnessing reporting and analysis software to unleash the power of information to all types of business users
• Do everything in threes: three types of performance dashboards (i.e., operational, tactical, and strategic) each contain three types of applications (i.e., monitoring, analysis, and management) and three layers of information (i.e., graphical, multidimensional, and transactional)

Moving from concept to reality, Performance Dashboards showcases each type of performance dashboard using a real-world example from Quicken Loans, International Truck and Engine Corporation, and Hewlett–Packard. These and other case studies show you how to build performance dashboards and what benefits they offer. Finally, Performance Dashboards synthesizes the tips and techniques from these case studies and leading practitioners in the field, showing you how to:

• Evaluate your company's organizational and technical readiness to undertake a successful performance dashboard project
• Create effective KPIs that change organizational behavior and improve performance
• Design powerful dashboard screens that communicate relevant facts quickly and concisely
• Integrate existing performance dashboards and metrics using a top-down or bottom-up approach
• Align business and technical teams to deliver a scalable and sustainable solution
• Evangelize a performance dashboard solution and ensure end-user adoption

Whether you are an executive looking to learn more about dashboards or scorecards, an IT professional needing to better understand how to implement dashboards, or a college student preparing for a career armed with the most cutting-edge thinking about how to improve organizational performance, Performance Dashboards is for you.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (October 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471724173
• ISBN-13: 978-0471724179
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #27,922 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Performance Dashboards, January 9, 2007

By	John Himpleman - See all my reviews

The first two-thirds of the book were extremely disappointing and added very little value to the understanding of how to create effective dashboards. Instead, the author spent far too much time discussing IT concepts and buzzwords such as datamarts, multidimensional databases, operational data stores and OLAP tools. Much of the book reads as a platform for why one needs to invest in IT to help manage your business performance. It wasn't until the final third of the book that some useful concepts were explored regarding how a non-IT person should go about developing a solid performance dashboard.

30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 stars +! Must have if you're in Performance Management as IT or Management Consultant, January 3, 2006

By	Marcel Chiranov (Bucuresti, Romania) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm PMP (Project Management Professional), active in Performance Management for the last 6 years. My IT knowledge is about the average, I'm very confident in design sophisticated Excel files to sort and analyze Performance data. This is a type of book I was looking for a while! Help me to understand the IT side of managing Performance Management data. It is not an IT book, this means even non IT educated readers, like myself, can highly benefit of it.

I strongly reccomend this book to a variety of professionals for different reasons:
* to not so experienced Managers and Project Managers: it gives a great overview of how is possible to integrate IT in business/projects in order to take fully advantage of using accurate data, benefit actionable information, be results oriented. Also it shows how is possible to succesfully manage design and implement a Performance Dashboard project, and use it to empower people, stay on target, understand the big picture. This is an excellent start to understand how to deal with IT projects, and how to smartly use IT in taking right time decisions.
* to experienced Managers and Project Managers: a superb view of how to communicate better with IT, speak same language and design results oriented applications. The author presents very well how is possible try to balance and to compromise (and hopefully succeed!) the IT need of planning, and clear specifications, and management desire to have the final product in place over the night. Strongly hope the managers will better understand this process and they will learn it is worth while spend some more time with planning and testing, instead of waisting 10 times more later, in desperate attempts to catch up with changes, running around the clock and making last time improvements.
* for IT professionals: it might be a back on earth lesson. In a lot of companies IT is a tool to reach business objectives and not the ultimate goal. The people wich are not so IT skilled might be good some other places, and is nice they are like this. If IT experts will spend some more time with them, they finally might understand how can use IT applications in their advantage.

I will keep it as a future refference when I'll be in the position to design performance measurement databases, customize reports, plan data analyzis, join teams with IT experts. Thank you Wayne, this really helped me!

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Guide to fully understanding the "Dashboard", August 2, 2006

By	Steven Tracy "Managing Consultant/BI Practice" (Canton, CT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have designed and implemented "Dashboards" in many forms going back to the time when any vendor with a "portal" product and some widgets claimed they had a "Dashboard" offering. Today, the successful Performance Dashboards truly are effective business management tools with fresh, personalized content based on business goals and processes.

Books like this above all need to be accessible to their audience, yet complete and have some actionable items that add value. As someone who works intimately with the topics covered in this book, I can attest to its completeness and practical value. In this book Wayne does a fantastic job of covering the wide spectrum of issues involved, yet offers practical guidance to manage the critical first steps in defining and creating Performance Dashboards. I have executed multiple dashboard projects with both in-house solutions and Business Objects Performance Manager. I strongly recommend this book anyone considering sponsoring a Dashboard project - Wayne has nailed both the myriad of potential pitfalls and the positive approach to keep you on track from the start. Excellent book!
- Steven Tracy