Performance dashboards are used by management to gauge performance and how the business is making progress towards business goals. They can be hard to define since they apply to a wide spectrum of objectives, such as evaluating a business strategy globally or looking specifically at one department or team.

Tableau is a very easy software to use. By now, you are probably running through lots of scenarios where Tableau is useful to your business. Perhaps some of your colleagues are starting to eye your work so far and are looking at ways in which Tableau could be applicable to their teams.

Although Tableau is very easy to use, dashboards often fail their objectives because they are not aligned with the business goals. Perhaps the objectives themselves are poorly defined; in such cases, dashboards will simply reflect the poorly thought out objectives. It is possible that the dashboard will simply show a mediocre strategy, and accordingly, the business will only become good at executing a mediocre strategy. However, this situation must be better than executing no strategy at all and basing business decisions on a month-by-month reporting calendar. A dashboard is a picture that communicates the business vision clearly.

How can we be sure that a dashboard meets the expectations of the business audience? There are a number of important factors, which are as follows:

Often, the dynamics of an organization would be such that you cannot introduce a change too quickly. A dashboard can help you identify the key drivers that departments use when evaluating performance; then, you can start to align them with the drivers of other departments so that end user departments can start to work together. Communication is often a key failure point in many organizations, and this alignment is a step towards getting everyone headed in the right direction. The process of creating a dashboard can help in defining the clarity that is needed across the organization, since this process begins with communication.

It is essential to have a fitting definition of the metrics. What is going to be measured? If you are creating dashboards across the organization, then flexibility is going to be a key factor in order to facilitate the alignment. The metrics should be meaningful to the consumers with a logical structure and repeatable results. The dashboard should help generate and translate the data into actions that are aimed towards the organizational goals.

Further, more we must also have manageability of the metrics. Who is going to manage the dashboard? Is there a data steward within the organization? Dashboards are no good if nobody looks at them. Within many organizations, a lot of work has gone into reports and dashboards that have then been ignored and gone into obscurity. Sometimes, this happens because people do not like what they say! That being said, placing unrealistic metrics on a dashboard is a certain route to dashboard failure, since it will result in a lack of support, ultimately rendering the dashboard irrelevant.

It can be hard to meet these success criteria for dashboards. It can often be a challenge to define metrics that target strategic objectives such as return on investment or governance. The most useful dashboards are the ones that are implemented with a project sponsor who is senior in the organization and able to push the organization through a change. Is there a change champion within the organization? Are they onboard?

Dashboarding and the scorecard approach will become more prevalent with the emphasis on Big Data. Implementing Big Data approaches is only part of the Big Data story, and we will always need ways to learn from our data. This chapter will help us make our dashboards more meaningful to our organization using Tableau.