trendlines
Of Dashboards and
Scorecards
You get what you pay for. Deploying an inexpensive performance dashboard (licensable for under Rs 22.5 lakh) may yield results in the short term. But, the need to increase the scale of your dashboard will require significant additional time and investment. Plan for the long haul. Successfully deploying a dashboard or scorecard often leads to requests from other departments for similar performance management tools. If you are not prepared to rapidly expand the scale and scope of your system, the extra drain on databases and processing power will lead to slower response times. Plan for real time. Even if the business side is not requesting daily updates, being prepared to deliver them more timely data yields more valuable dashboards and scorecards, and allows the business to optimize performance more proactively. Develop effective metrics. Metrics are ultimately the key to the success of your dashboard/scorecard. Many techniques are available for ensuring that the metrics used are effective, including getting user buy-in, simplifying by using fewer metrics, avoiding perfectionism, and monitoring and revising as metrics lose business impact. Involve technical people. One common mistake is to create metrics for which no data exists. To avoid this awkward situation, make sure you assign technical people to the team.
Airplane
Flight Decks Go
Paperless
A V IATI O N TEC H N O L O G Y Anyone who’s visited a commercial airplane cockpit will tell you there’s usually a whole lot of paper in there. That 77-pound briefcase you saw the pilot lug up the gangway didn’t contain a copy of War and Peace he intends to read: it’s stuffed with navigational charts, weight and balance data, and operating manuals. Some airlines are replacing these paper-based processes with electronic flight bag (EFB) technology. JetBlue made a splash in 2000 when it equipped its pilots and first officers with laptops to access flight manuals and make pre-flight load and balance calculations that it said would reduce the airline’s printing costs and also save 4,800 man-hours a year. “The typical airline is operating hundreds, if not thousands, of flights a day. That’s a lot of paper, so there’s a definite cost and environmental benefit to the technology,” says Henry Harteveldt, vice president of travel research for Forrester. “There’s also immediacy,” so pilots always have updated data, he says. FedEx has used EFBs since 1991, but most commercial airlines couldn’t justify the technology due to implementation costs and communications infrastructure challenges. Today, more passenger airlines are getting on board. JetBlue’s laptops, considered Class 1 EFBs by the Federal Aviation Administration, are just like yours — they have to be stowed. Virgin America plans to take off next year with Class 2 EFBs, which mount in the cockpit of its Airbus A320s. The Class 2 option will be less expensive than equipping every pilot with his own laptop, says Virgin America. The ultimate goal is a nearly paperless flight deck except for one checklist. Houghton says that will increase efficiency, reduce costs and raise the quality of life for pilots — they’ll have a free hand to carry a change of clothes for dinner or a good book.
Illust ration by P C A no op
D a t a W a r e ho u s i n g Dashboards and scorecards are becoming ubiquitous business tools, according to a recent survey from The Data Warehousing Institute. The report, based on a winter 2006 survey of corporate IT professionals, BI consultants, and business sponsors/users, identifies numerous trends found in recent dashboard and scorecard deployments. The report found that a majority of groups surveyed have deployed a dashboard and scorecard, often within the same application. Also, dashboard and scorecard projects are overwhelmingly businessdriven, meaning they are initiated and guided by business leaders. Dashboards and scorecards are still in their infancy, according to the report. Most support fewer than 50 users and maintain less than 50 GB of data. Many organizations report that they haven’t spent a lot of money on dashboard/scorecard deployments. The report makes several best practices recommendations:
—By Stephanie Overby 18
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11/10/2006 8:15:52 PM