A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one`s objectives, consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.
Executive dashboards have become very popular mechanisms to feed executives with at-a-glance information on the organisation`s strategic KPIs. Without having to page through screens full of data, an executive can instantaneously gauge the company`s performance, especially if the appropriate thresholds and pre-warning indicators have been set.
The CIO is the equivalent executive sponsor on IT`s side for all the other executives` dashboards. So what should he then have on his dashboard?
Proliferation vs Penetration
Proliferation measures would indicate to the CIO how many dashboards are out there in the organisation, and even how many measures are reported on each. But that is not such useful information... He wants to know whether they are actually using the extensive (and expensive) per-field drill-down capabilities his team has developed with great effort for them. Detailed dashboard usage statistics would give the CIO a much better idea how far the dashboards have penetrated into the management styles of the executives.
The same applies to the penetration of analytics results and even production reports into the organisation. A good quantitative measure would be the penetration of BI-delivered reports vs the number of "spreadmarts" that are manually populated and used as reporting mechanisms.
Users vs Usage
On a similar note, it is good for a CIO to know the degree to which the organisation is "informed". The number of licensed business intelligence tool users may sound good, but it is actually their type of usage of the tool that really provides useful information. Do they run simple canned pre-developed reports or do they regularly do their own reports and analyses in power-user style?
Another extremely valuable usage-related statistic gives an indication of the ROI of the underlying data warehouse. The data warehouse may consume terabyte upon terabyte of storage space, but if only 5% of the historic data - eg that related to client buying patterns - is used for long-term trend analysis, does it make sense to keep all of it online? (Now factor in and report the DBA`s stress-level to make all this work in the fast-reducing batch window, then the CIO has real information at his fingertips.)
Data quality metrics
As the ultimate custodian of the organisation`s informational resource, the CIO is squarely responsible for data quality. Therefore it follows that he should measure and monitor what he is trying to manage. There are a myriad of data quality measures that can be reported. Examples of inherent data quality measures include: completeness or coverage (meaning that there are required values for all required fields, validity (the data values conform to domain and business rules), accuracy to source (the reported data agree with the data values in the original source systems) and precision (that the values are correct to the right degree of granularity). Examples of pragmatic data quality measures include: accessibility (the ability for users to access the data when required), timeliness (the duration between the real world event and when the information about the event becomes available) and contextual clarity (that the data presentation enables an exact understanding of its meaning).
There are pages and pages of data quality metrics that can be defined - the big danger is that the CIO`s data quality dashboard must not start looking like an encyclopaedia with screens and screens of details which do not highlight the key areas. One of the key uses of a dashboard is that it must highlight exceptions instead of reporting details on the norm.
Summary
The CFO is the custodian of the financial resources of the organization. He has a dashboard reflecting the changes in financial status at his fingertips, with cash flow and debtor days updated as they change. Similarly, the sales director has stock movements, sales campaign effectiveness and related sales figures flashing on his activity monitoring dashboard as they come in.
So, our CIO, who is the custodian of the information resource of the organisation, should also have flashing lights and dials indicating the quality and penetration of one of the most undervalued resources of the organisation.
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