We’ve seen increasing trends in Dashboards building across organization along with the popularity of data analytics. Sometimes the requests to have ‘a dashboard’ is just for the sake of having one dashboard to show that the organization had done something ‘data analytics’
However, to make the dashboards impactful for the business, we need to start analyzing the needs of business and the technical availability before designing the suitable dashboard.
This blog is about ‘Dashboard Canvas’ which we’ll explore the framework from Davoy.tech to solve the problem.
The top part of Dashboard Canvas is to set the right framework and expectations from the dashboard.
We’ll need to start at Business Objective of why do we need to do dashboards. For example, CEO dashboards might want to see sales performance or promotion effectiveness while HR department head might want to see what’s the turnover rate for each departments.
Next, we’ll have to think of Business Insights that we would like to make analysis from the dashboards. In other words, how can we change our business decisions if we’ve known the information. For instances, the company might want to reward the salespersons who hit the sales target, reorder the fast selling products with low stocks or improve promotion campaigns.
The lower part of Dashboard Canvas is to see the process or flow of the data.
All the data would be generated by Business Process such as opening sales invoice from sales orders. It is very important to understand the business process to understand the data and, thus, designing the suitable dashboard. There was a time that I did almost finish the dashboard development and I realized that I did not understand business process well. This resulted as I need to re-develop many parts of my dashboards according to the business process.
The data would then be captured in the Data Sources. This could be the company’s ERP system such as Microsoft Dynamics, or SAP, or other systems. It could also be manual written or key-in to Microsoft Excel file. The good example of manual data is sales target for each salesperson. Another example of data source could be online marketing sources such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Tiktok Ads and e-commerce websites such as Amazon, Shopee, Lazada. Listing out the data sources would enable us to see which data is available or we might need to capture more data. Moreover, it would help us with the integration with BI Tools or Data Warehouse in the next step.
Many companies do have Data Warehouse and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs to put the data from data sources to their warehouse. On the other hand, many system also acted as their own databases such as Dynamic AX which has underlying Microsoft SQL Server. We should also identify how the data is collected/consolidated as well as how often are the updates to the Warehouse.
The output of data is called Data Product this could be a most commonly used ‘dashboards’ or excel reports. It could also be list of customers to send the email campaign too. Identifying the products will solve the problems of having redundant data output and overwork to data team. Besides, we should also see whether the data product is needed to be update manually or automatically and what is the refresh interval.
Last but not least is the User who will consume the data products. Knowing who will be looking at the dashboards helps in designing from both the user persona perspective and their roles in the organization. For instance, some CEO might prefer only high level simple summary but marketing directors want to drill down to the specific order.
You can find the Canvas with the example below.
You can fill in the contact form below to get ‘free’ consultation on this dashboard canvas with Davoy.tech
Photo Credits Target icons created by Freepik – Flaticon Insight icons created by Eucalyp – Flaticon Online shop icons created by Freepik – Flaticon Collection icons created by Parzival’ 1997 – Flaticon Data processing icons created by Eucalyp – Flaticon Product icons created by Freepik – Flaticon People icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
