Performance Dashboard Design

Herschel advocates for the definition of BI given by Azvine, Cui, and Nauck, stating that BI is all about how to capture, access, understand, analyse, and turn one of the most valuable assets of an enterprise - raw data - into actionable information to improve business performance. BI includes the following processes and technologies: budgeting, forecasting, reporting, strategic planning, score-carding, analysis, big data and analytics, dashboarding, data mining, and data warehousing. These processes and technologies allow for a systematic, integrated approach to link strategy to core organisational processes and activities, ultimately to empower management decisions. Maturity models have been developed to define and categorise the state of an organisation's capability. Eckerson indicates that organisations that are in the early stages of BI can still improve business value; however, to reap the full benefits of BI, the organisation must progress to higher levels. Performance dashboards are a BI tool. Malik describes the evolution of data reports from a time when reporting was operational - with hard-copy reports that were not user-friendly - to being enterprise-wide with the use of dashboards, ad hoc analyses, and online analytical processing (OLAP) reports. All processes and technologies that form part of BI are important contributors to successful strategy implementation. Performance dashboards encompass data mining, data warehousing, and analysis (including OLAP), as these are fundamental technologies that support the adaptation and long-term success of dashboards. Dashboarding has therefore become very popular among managers, and has emerged as a tool that can effectively be used, accessed, and understood at all levels of an organisation.

The literature review aimed to explore the design of performance dashboards in relation to achieving organisational strategic goals.