Using Dashboards In Business Analysis

Due to the development of information technology, every enterprise has a lot of data, which magnify the difficulties of selecting the most relevant. Hence, appears the mistake of measuring too many things. Owning too much information, will lead to vagueness, the opposite effect of a measuring system. This phenomenon does not depend on the manager's ability to compute and communicate, but rather on the ability to provide adequate information, to take good decisions and to compare results with the planned objectives. These can be done through a user interface - Dashboard, which is a tool that allows the alignment of business processes and strategies implementation. Dashboards are more than a collection of indicators and graphics, they are found in different forms and interfaces. Dashboards answer to many questions of the organization and are addressed to different types of audiences. Before creating a Dashboard, we must answer the following questions: who is our audience, what decisions should be taken after the analysis, in what context will be used, how often should be measured the indicators? Once an enterprise has identified a need for a dashboard, managers must go through the process of defining what they will include in their dashboard (key risk indicators and key performance indicators). This paper shows how this methodology has developed, the main features and benefits of Dashboards, as well as the most used software for creating them. As the main objective of the paper is to discuss how Dashboards can be used in business analysis (BA), in introduction, there are presented some general ideas about BA and benefits of using Dashboards. In the next section, there are presented several definitions for Dashboards and the steps which must be followed for implementing an efficient one. In the case study is created a dashboard for sales analysis of an enterprise, using Tableau Public. The paper ends with some conclusions and with the list of references.