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If your information dashboard solution has been in production for 6 months or more, it is time for you to conduct a review. Such a review does not have to be a long and complicated process – it should typically take 3 or 4 days time spread over 2 weeks.

The review should cover the following aspects of your information dashboard:

1. How many users does your dashboard reach?
2. How engaged are those users?
3. What is the relevance of the information dashboard?
4. What is the coverage of available and required information?
5. What is the quality of the information displayed on your dashboard?
6. How responsive is your dashboard solution?
7. Is your dashboard aligned with current strategy?

Begin by asking for the following information from your dashboard web logs.

(1) how many distinct users have visited your dashboard,

(2) how many of these users have visited once, once per month, once per week, or more than once per week,

(3) what is the average session duration (length of time viewing the dashboard) in each of the above categories? These numbers will help you answer the first two questions in the review.

Stop. If you have few users, few repeat users, and extremely short session times, you should not continue the review. Asking the questions below in this situation will indicate to your users that you have no idea what is going on. Your project is in deep trouble and you’ll need some help to get out. Begin with a single “friendly” user, and get their honest feedback about why the dashboard is not being used. Use this feedback to resolve issues and prepare for a re-launch of a dashboard more in tune with what users need.

If your dashboard does have reasonable reach and engagement, you can proceed to survey your users. The best way to do this is by phone or in person. If your user community is too large for this, interview 20-25 representative users, and then use an email survey for the rest. The questions to ask are:

1. What information on the dashboard do you find most useful and why?
2. What information on the dashboard do you not find useful?
3. What information is not on the dashboard that you require?
4. Have you had any data quality or timeliness concerns?

The answers to the first 3 questions will help you assess the relevance of the information on your dashboard. To determine coverage, examine the list of information requirements and identify those which can be answered using existing corporate data, and which cannot. The first category compared with the useful information already on your dashboard gives you the coverage of available information. The second category tells you how many requests cannot be covered without collecting additional data.

The fourth question addresses the issue of data quality. You need to know if users have ever experienced incorrect data, or delays in getting the data they need. This is a crucial area – credibility among executive users is hard won and easily lost.

Responsiveness is simply a function of how quickly you have been able to respond to requests for functional changes and enhancements. If you have a project tracking system in place, it should be a quick matter to answer this question – if not, a few conversations will likely give you a clue.

Finally, alignment can be assessed by reviewing the latest memos, presentations and other information describing your organization’s strategy. Compare this with the content and form of your dashboard solution, and judge the level of alignment for yourself. If you lack alignment, consider whether this is because the dashboard is at fault, or because your users who have generated the requirements are not aligned with the strategy. In the latter case, it is wise to have an “off-the-record” conversation with a friendly user to determine the best path forward.

You’ll note that we have not discussed usability concerns in this review. Dashboard usability is a paramount concern, worthy of a separate investigation. Information gleaned from this review process may indicate the need to conduct such an investigation sooner than you otherwise would have.

Floyd Kelly is Principal of Collaborative Performance

Read his latest book: Information Dashboard Success

Tags: Balanced Scorecard, Information Dashboard, Scorecard

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