February 14, 2005

In B2B, getting a view of business events as they happen is a big part of how you can win an important competitive advantage.

You may not have heard of the late Colonel John Boyd, but his OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) schema has become one of the core principles of modern warfare specifically and decision making generally.

According to Boyd, going through the OODA loop faster than your rivals is a big part of what delivers victory on the battlefield; more recently, some enterprises have adopted the OODA paradigm into their own competitive strategy.

There's much more to the idea, including "getting inside" the OODA loops of rivals, but this introduction should suffice to why dashboards are so important.

A dashboard is a real-time or close to real-time template that lets you see business metrics -- e.g., daily sales, costs of production, worker productivity, supplier performance [as in delivery times], and just about anything else that can be measured.

A dashboard takes advantage of data warehousing, integration, business intelligence (BI), and other back-end technologies to reach back into the appropriate systems of records, then delivers that information either via its own interface or as part of a larger enterprise portal.

A dashboard plugs into every component of the OODA loop.

It is where you observe what is going on in your business; it lets you orient that information to, say, existing internal goals, industry benchmarks, or the performance of competitors; now, you can decide whether the business is on the right track or not, and calibrate your responses accordingly and can even begin to act by, if you are within an enterprise portal, pushing out alerts to the employees responsible for key areas of performance.

The growing awareness of how dashboards and associated technology actually constitute the DNA of an enterprise's all-important decision making process has led to increased dashboard adoption.

New research from AMR says that 26 percent of large companies implemented dashboards and scorecards over the past year, and another 13 percent are implementing this year. The opportunity is not just limited to enterprises, as 15 percent of mid-market companies are now using dashboards/scorecards, with 34 percent of the entire segment now in the evaluation cycle.

That's not the only measure of the power of dashboards. AMR found that the average number of seats for dashboard deployments will go from 355 now to 676 in 18 months; in other words, as soon as companies begin to bolster and speed up their OODA loops with the aid of e-business tools, they want to spread access to an increasing number of employees.

If you, too, are ready to make the dashboard commitment, AMR counsels you to keep the following in mind:

*Get business users (e.g. end users, systems analysts, and process improvement teams) involved both early and often, because they're the ones who can help you understand how to best design and tweak dashboards.

*Keep scalability and flexibility in mind, as dashboards have viral appeal and utility. You may find yourself with more users than expected.

*Standardize metrics so that you always know and agree up on the data that the dashboard presents.

*Work with vendors who back industry standards, as this makes it easier to interact with other enterprise systems and data.

Since dashboards can be delivered by a host of different kinds of vendors, and themselves need the cooperation and integration of various systems to work, deciding on a vendor will require a fair amount of diligence and consideration.

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