bMighty talked with dashboard expert and iDashboards executive Shadan Malik on how and why small and midsize business need dashboards now to take rich data extracted by data mining and present it in a coherent, accessible fashion
Small and midsize businesses are besieged with information about their businesses. Not that that's a bad thing. It's the business intelligence that they are mining from all their data that has the potential to tell them all they need to know to compete and succeed. But how to access and understand all that rich information? That's where dashboards, which have the capacity to explain, organize, and present business intelligence, come in. Who better to explain to us the power of this tool than Shadan Malik, president and CEO of iDashboards, a business intelligence dashboard software firm? Malik holds two patents in the area of data visualization for dashboards and wrote a book on dashboard best practices. bMighty talked with Malik about the importance of dashboards and how they can be instrumental in helping small and midsize businesses survive and thrive in a competitive market.
Shadan Malik, iDashboards
bMighty: Why does a small or midsize business need a dashboard?
Malik: A dashboard improves the quality and delivery of information. Does the [small or midsize business] need better information? A dashboard will improve decision-making capabilities. Almost any small or midsize organization can use dashboards to have a better impact on decision making in their business.
I do sincerely believe that the soul of Business Intelligence is going downstream to small and midsize businesses. If you talk about business intelligence and data mining, dashboards bring it all together in a very effective fashion to the business user. Look at the dashboard on a car. You can have a 19-year old drive the most sophisticated car, all they need to know is how to read the dashboard and three or four key performance indicators. The sophistication of the car is completely masked. Dashboards are about mapping all the sophistication. It's taking all that sophistication and making it useable to the decision maker. Just like pilots need dashboards to fly a plane, small and midsize businesses need dashboards to steer their organizations.
Sample dashboard, courtesy of iDashboards
bMighty: How does a dashboard enhance business intelligence? How does it help leverage information?
Malik: Without a dashboard, data is collected at various sources, usually with spreadsheets, and, if the decision makers don't have the time, analysts take the information and put it in a PowerPoint and give it to the decision makers. There are a lot of manual processes involved and the chance of errors is great and it takes a long time so the information is already old. [This process] degrades the quality and delivery of the information. Dashboards improve the impact of information -- graphically and easily for the decision maker, or for anybody who [is a consumer of information] and needs effective information to do a better job. It effectively presents the information and [the information] can be accessed from the source. There is no middle person involved. It makes it much quicker for end users and [provides] more impact. All this processing of data from Excel to Word is done. It's "near time" which is as good as "real time."
I have a good example. A stent manufacturer's factories were shut down by the FDA because a defect was found in the product. [This was because] by the time the feedback got back to the decision makers and by the time they realized [there was a defect and] they had to stop production, it took 40 days. So many people had defective stents. Information delays can be over a month. The mandate from the FDA was that [from then on] a problem had to be reported within one to two business days. They had to implement dashboards to get the information quickly.
Next Page: But Do Dashboards Enhance the Bottom Line?
