Executive Dashboard Comparison
Executive dashboards are a requirement for intelligent organizations that need to respond to opportunities in a responsive manner. The term "executive dashboard" is receiving a lot of play from business partners/vendors. Many IT managers are also using the terms dashboard and portal synonymously.
The two technologies aren't synonymous, although they are very similar. An enterprise portal is just that: a portal. It is a browser-based gateway to integrated information and applications to promote information sharing, consistency, and accessibility to members of the organization. An executive dashboard, although it uses the same underlying technology, is a much smaller-scale subset of portal technology that provides specific, performance-based …show more content…
A portal's scope is organization wide; it serves as a single-point that connects all the partners in an organization's value chain. Customers, vendors, employees, executive management, anyone or any organization that's a stakeholder can be a portal user. For example, employees can access SAP functionality, customer information, sales databases, stored documents, from anywhere in the organization via the Internet. Customers can access such things as inventory, call up sales histories, download marketing materials, and place or check the status of orders. In essence, a portal is an enterprise wide gateway to manage traffic up and down …show more content…
It's a one-page overview of all critical measurements necessary to make executive decisions that will affect the organization's bottom line. For instance, a plastics company might want to build a dashboard to track key performance indicators in its finance organization. Metrics that could be of interest include gross margin, earnings before interest and taxes, bad debt ratios, payables and receivables aging, and SG&A expenses per product line and employee, the list could go on and on, and it's not restricted to finance. Any organization that needs to monitor performance indicators in order to make critical decisions can benefit from a dashboard.
In order to differentiate an effective executive dashboard from ordinary business intelligence application there's a list of features that every dashboard should provide. Specifically, a dashboard should have:
A single screen, web-based picture of the organization with drill-down capability on key performance indicators.
Real-time presentation of information in chart/graph format, based on data pulled from the data warehouse/data
The two technologies aren't synonymous, although they are very similar. An enterprise portal is just that: a portal. It is a browser-based gateway to integrated information and applications to promote information sharing, consistency, and accessibility to members of the organization. An executive dashboard, although it uses the same underlying technology, is a much smaller-scale subset of portal technology that provides specific, performance-based …show more content…
A portal's scope is organization wide; it serves as a single-point that connects all the partners in an organization's value chain. Customers, vendors, employees, executive management, anyone or any organization that's a stakeholder can be a portal user. For example, employees can access SAP functionality, customer information, sales databases, stored documents, from anywhere in the organization via the Internet. Customers can access such things as inventory, call up sales histories, download marketing materials, and place or check the status of orders. In essence, a portal is an enterprise wide gateway to manage traffic up and down …show more content…
It's a one-page overview of all critical measurements necessary to make executive decisions that will affect the organization's bottom line. For instance, a plastics company might want to build a dashboard to track key performance indicators in its finance organization. Metrics that could be of interest include gross margin, earnings before interest and taxes, bad debt ratios, payables and receivables aging, and SG&A expenses per product line and employee, the list could go on and on, and it's not restricted to finance. Any organization that needs to monitor performance indicators in order to make critical decisions can benefit from a dashboard.
In order to differentiate an effective executive dashboard from ordinary business intelligence application there's a list of features that every dashboard should provide. Specifically, a dashboard should have:
A single screen, web-based picture of the organization with drill-down capability on key performance indicators.
Real-time presentation of information in chart/graph format, based on data pulled from the data warehouse/data