Performance dashboards are used by management to gauge performance and to identify how the business is progressing towards business goals. These 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 simple software to use. By now, you are probably running through lots of scenarios in which 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 easy to use, dashboards often fail in achieving 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 only show a mediocre strategy, and accordingly, the business will only be able to execute 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 aligning them with the drivers of other departments so that end-user departments can start working together. Communication is often a key failure point in many organizations, and this alignment is a step in getting everyone headed in the right direction. The process of creating a dashboard can help in defining the clarity 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, the metrics should be manageable. 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 the dashboards say! That 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, as defining metrics that target strategic objectives such as return on investment or governance can often be a challenge. The most useful dashboards are those 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.