Companies across different industries are utilizing
dashboards, including ING Direct.
ING DIRECT is part of ING (NYSE: ING), one of the
top financial organizations in the world. The phenomenal performance of the
company is apparent from the fact that ING DIRECT was launched in the United
States in the fall of 2000 and has already grown to be one of the eight direct
banks operated globally by ING; the other locations are Canada, Australia,
France, Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany (where ING DIRECT is known
as DiBa), with a total worldwide customer base of more than 10 million
(including U.S. customers).
Business Drivers for Dashboards
Four key business drivers for dashboards were the
following:
-
Monitoring of results
-
Single version of the truth
-
Measurement of deliverables
-
Cost reduction through automation
Monitoring of results: Business
managers wanted to easily monitor results to quickly respond and adjust the
course of business as needed. For example, company management wanted to monitor
the direct mail results. Users can easily view and analyze the results of
marketing activity with more than 30 different data dimensions.
Single version of the truth:
Different managers arrived at different numbers for the same metrics being
reported in various reports. This led to wasted resources in validation and a
lack of conviction about the available information. We needed a solution to
unify the various information sources with a common gateway for information
delivery. Dashboards helped deliver accurate information to multiple people
across multiple departments within the company.
Measured deliverables
have a higher chance of success. Company management wanted a clear set of
measurable goals that would be displayed and well conveyed across the
organization. Dashboards enhanced management's ability to get all managers
within the organization to focus on the top-priority deliverables.
Automation reduces cost. On
average, we had two people in each of the ten different departments spending all
of their time manually processing and crunching numbers. We wanted to leverage
technology to introduce greater efficiency. Dashboard deployment helped achieve
greater automation and reduced the number to six people who now maintain the
process for all ten departments. The automation has led to far fewer errors as
well.
Vendor Selection
There were four key criteria and feature
requirements during the vendor selection process:
-
Web based for ease of access, administration, upgrades, security, and so on
-
Industry standard to ensure that experienced resources could be hired
-
Recognized and well-respected leader in the online analytical processing
field
-
Company that spends a better than average percentage of revenues on R&D to
ensure that applications remain competitive
Implementation
IT was fully involved from the beginning because
dashboards were just one of many important applications that needed to have a
steady flow of high-quality information. IT built a corporate-wide data
warehouse that is used to satisfy the key business drivers listed previously.
Subsequently, multiple other applications were implemented using the same data
source. It was very important to build the dashboards first because the
OLAP/dashboards became crucial components of the user acceptance testing for
these new applications.
Implementation never really ends because managers
continually want as much information as they can obtain. New products and
services are added, mergers and acquisitions take place, and dashboards at ING
DIRECT are used to support every department in the company. If the data is
available, it takes the IT team on average four to six months to automate the
reporting and analysis for one department.
Early User Reaction
Early user reaction was and continues to be
enthusiastic. Dashboards and OLAP enabled managers to do their jobs more
efficiently. It saves many of them from having to manually generate the
information and allows them to think about the results instead.
User desire for data in higher volumes,
frequencies, and quality seems to have no bounds. Dashboards allow for the
presentation of real-time results such that managers can really feel the pulse
of the business and easily access a wealth of information, but still they want
more.
We have kept development focus on solving specific
business issues and answering specific business questions. The early adopters
eagerly show the other managers and use spreads quickly.
Lessons Learned
The major lesson learned is that there are many
different types of managers whose capacity to digest information in different
ways is endless. Some power users jump right in, but most users do not have the
time or motivation to learn new software applications. The golden rule is to
simplify, simplify, simplify! The easier the application is to use, the more
likely it is to be readily adopted. We ended up creating dashboards and OLAP for
multiple user levels.
Uniformity is crucial. Table of contents, user
guides, icons, menus, graphics, FAQs, and the look and feel of dashboards should
all be very similar. The finance manager should be able to easily drive the
credit or treasury dashboard because it looks and behaves similarly to the
finance dashboard.
Thoughts for the Future
Dashboards will evolve to become even more
intelligent and an even more important tool for managers. They will be able to
provide automated alerts that send an e-mail or text message to users, triggers
that automatically run a report or complete an analysis, automated modeling that
will generate additional results based on what the manager is analyzing,
suggestions of what business users might want to view based on recent changes in
the data, links to powerful models or other information sources, and so on.
Dashboards will be the predominant way for people to receive communication on
the results of their computer programs. The closer computer programs and
applications simulate true artificial intelligence, the more important
dashboards will become.
Shadan Malik is the author of Enterprise Dashboards: Design & Best Practices for IT published by John Wiley & Sons, portions of which appear here (reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.).