www.novell.com White Paper

Executive Dashboards: Elements of Success April 2009

p. 2

Dashboards: the Complete Picture for Business and IT..........................................................................................3

Dashboards: Lessons Learned................................................................................................................................3

Characteristics of a Successful Dashboard .............................................................................................................4

Implementing a Successful Dashboard Project .......................................................................................................8

A Dashboard Case Study: Online E-Card Retailing ................................................................................................9

Leveraging Novell for a Successful Dashboard Project.........................................................................................11

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D a s h b o a r d s : t h e C o m p l e t e P i c t u r e f o r B u s i n e s s a n d I T Management dashboards have risen to the top of business and IT priority lists in recent months—and for good

reason. Dashboards have become an essential enabler in sustaining a highly competitive business. Why? Quite

simply, by consolidating essential IT service quality metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business

process health into one interactive view, dashboards provide a real-time and historical window into overall

business performance. What’s more, because dashboards can also provide actionable information, business and

IT managers can more effectively manage the areas of business for which they are responsible.

This is especially necessary in today’s post-Enron business environment where business and IT managers

are being held to higher levels of accountability. In response, top executives are mandating dashboard projects

to deliver meaningful visibility not only into business performance, but also into government regulatory

compliance.

For companies rushing to outsource business processes or entire IT operations, dashboards provide an

effective means to monitor, measure and report on the quality of services provided by an outsourcer. For many

IT organizations, communicating the level of IT service quality delivered to the business has become a means of

survival—if IT can demonstrate that it’s providing a high quality service, there’s no need to consider outsourcing

as an alternative. For these companies, dashboards provide a mechanism to communicate the business value

provided by IT.

In all cases, dashboards provide an effective means to empower business and IT management with

accurate, real-time and historical information necessary to running a successful and competitive business.

However, many dashboard projects falter when they fail to link critical business metrics with IT performance

results and are unable to present a “complete picture” of a business process or service. Without an actionable,

relevant, end-to-end view of the complete business service based on real-time information, IT and business

managers are simply flying blind.

In this white paper, we’ll investigate the characteristics and metrics of successful dashboards as well as

successful dashboard projects within today’s business-centric enterprise. We’ll also discuss how Novell can help

today’s companies design, develop, and deploy successful dashboard projects.

D a s h b o a r d s : L e s s o n s L e a r n e d Dashboards are not a new concept; in fact, they’ve been around for nearly twenty years. According to Forrester

Research, dashboards are in their third incarnation, having evolved from executive information systems (EIS) of

the 1980s and dashboards/cockpits of the 1990s. EIS mechanisms were intended to be extensions of the

reporting systems in use at the time, targeted at executives who had little time to peruse the large volumes of

printed operational reports being generated by the IT organization.

Scorecards (sometimes referred to as Balanced Scorecards) played an important role in the evolution of

dashboards, according to Forrester. Although scorecards tend to be more rigorous than the average corporation

can accomplish, many practices established by scorecards have found their way into the less rigorous practices

of dashboards. In particular, poor dashboards are shallow representations of data out of context, whereas

scorecard methods taught us that data must be seen in its appropriate business context. Relationships learned

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from scorecards reveal that measures roll up into metrics, which roll up into KPIs, which (in some

implementations) role up into Norton/Kaplan-like perspectives.

So what have we learned from over twenty years of experience in building dashboards for executives and IT

managers? First, dashboards are needed across all areas of the business—from IT operations and IT

management—to virtually all lines of business. In fact, according to Glenn O’Donnell from Forrester Research,

“Business leaders demand quantifiable, objective evidence that their IT investment is bringing business value.”

Obviously, the business executive has little interest in looking at the technology-centric world of IT

management or IT operations. Executive dashboards today must present a more balanced view of business and

IT. Executives want to know how IT is affecting their business—not whether a Web server in the data center is

having a disk problem again. The opposite is true for IT operations and IT management staff who need a much

more technology-focused view. Figure 1 shows not only the pervasiveness of dashboard usage, but also

demonstrates what role business and IT information has for each end user within the enterprise.

Dashboards of the past have failed because they were too IT-centric, too static, too hard to use, or because

they lacked a role-based view. Today’s dashboards not only provide more balanced content, they’re also more

intuitive and interactive—and, just as importantly, they visualize business success or failure in real time. Gone

are the days of the weekly or monthly report. Executives want “real-time reporting of IT’s business impact…and

must be presented in business language,” according to O’Donnell.

C h a r a c t e r i s t i c s o f a S u c c e s s f u l D a s h b o a r d Today, dashboards are used for a variety of applications. From real-time and historical monitoring of critical

business KPIs to monitoring of essential business processes, dashboards are used in all phases of business and

IT service processes. Key examples include supply chain, order processing, inventory tracking, online trading

operations, even monitoring of IT outsourcers themselves.

In virtually all cases, effective dashboards incorporate the right balance of technical and business

information integrating relevant data extracted from existing systems and data bases. When building a

dashboard from scratch, it’s important to start with a few relevant metrics, establish a successful dashboard

Figure 1: The Pervasive Use of Dashboards

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prototype, and then build from there. It’s important to get actionable information into a “single pane of glass”

format. Actionable dashboards have the following characteristics:

• The end user can interact with the dashboard to drill down into more detailed information

• The end user can issue commands to remediate problems or notify appropriate parties

• The end user can discover root case or impact analysis

• The end user can reallocate resources when needed

When deciding upon which business metrics to incorporate, teams should choose those metrics that link

back to strategic initiatives within the company. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research of 22

early-adopter, billion dollar firms, C-level sponsors clearly echoed this sentiment and listed the following metrics

as most closely aligned to their business strategy and therefore, most important to their dashboard environment.

Not surprisingly, the list included:

• Sales

• Orders

• Profit

• Call volumes

• Expenses

• Forecasts

• Inventory

• Customer satisfaction

• Average order size

• Lost sales

• Project milestones

• Shipments

• Profit

However, business metrics alone provide only half of the equation. What’s missing is the health of IT and

how it is affecting the state of the business. Without this side of the equation, executives don’t have a clear

picture of business health. What’s needed is the integration of critical IT service factors that have an impact or

influence upon dashboarded business KPIs. In fact, among Global 2000 businesses today, IT services have

more impact on business performance than any other business factor, fraudulent behavior aside. In large part,

because IT services have become so interwoven into our daily lives, as business agents, that high quality IT

service quality is directly proportional to successful business performance. For example, just six years ago,

Fidelity Investments processed about 90 percent of its online trades over the phone, while a meager 10 percent

were conducted via the Internet. Today, these numbers are completely reversed, and system outages for Fidelity

translate to substantial amounts of lost revenue.

By adding in the right mix of IT service metrics, business and IT executives have an effective means to

instantly gauge business success. IT metrics that are meaningful to both IT and business; assimilate well with

established business organizations; and clearly supplement the business metrics previously mentioned include:

• System availability

• End-user response time

• Transaction volumes

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• Mean-time-to-repair

• SLA compliance

There are several ways that today’s dashboard projects will be dramatically different than the previous two

incarnations and why they will achieve a far greater level of adoption throughout the enterprise. One way is

linking all of these metrics back to their business owners and action takers to formulate dashboards that are

customized to individual roles within the business.

One other difference between today’s dashboards and those of even five years ago is the amount of

actionable data that is presented on the dashboard itself. According to Forrester Research, a key facet of

successful dashboards today lies in their inherent interactive nature. The capability to drill down from summary

data to detailed data offers executives and IT managers alike a powerful mechanism to perform root cause

analysis of problems that have surfaced within the business. That’s not to say that executive managers will need,

or want, to drill down into specific application or device alarms to determine the specific cause for poor

performance or system unavailability. However, it’s perfectly reasonable for an executive to drill down into a

geographical depiction of business applications running across the country to find out exactly which application is

impacting the business and whether it’s because of availability or performance. This will become clearer as we

illustrate some examples.

Let’s start with the customer dashboard depicted in Figure 2, which shows a consolidated view of

telecommunications services provided by Verizon Business to its outsourcing customers.

This dashboard view

integrates information

essential for a number of

different end users, from IT

management and operations

to Verizon Business end users

themselves. Dashboards,

such as in this case, usually

begin with some sort of

geographic representation of

the organization. Shown here

are six different payment

centers across the country—

and judging by its color, there

appears to be a problem in

Chicago.

Moving to the pane to the left, the business manager has an effective view of critical accounts receivable

business metrics—in this case, taken in real time from an existing ERP system. And to the left of that, other

business metrics show the health of payment center “business” from key perspectives important to the business,

such as volumes and suspect accounts. Finally, the bottom pane shows detailed health of the accounts

receivables process itself, integrating both business process and IT service metrics. The IT metrics themselves

Figure 2: Verizon Business Customer Dashboard

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were integrated from a Business Service Management (BSM) software solution that provides real-time

performance and availability information to the dashboard environment.

In this way, it’s easy for the business manager to see that there’s a problem with the approval security

system—a problem that is, in turn, causing a bottleneck that prevents information on receivables to flow through

the remaining process steps in the cycle.

Today, IT managers and operations personnel are also using dashboards to get an accurate real-time

perspective of IT service health. Take the case of an IT manager responsible for ensuring high availability for a

number of critical applications within a global financial institution—applications that include, among others, an

online trading application.

The dashboard in Figure 3 shows a view of service level health for each major IT and business process

component of this critical application. These process components include Internet access, service providers,

authentication and data center processes. It’s easy to see from this view that there’s trouble in a CICS region

located within the data center. Real-time alarms at the bottom of the screen provide more detailed analysis

information.

By drilling down into the CICS region problem, the IT manager can get an even more detailed view of

exactly where outage, availability, and SLA compliance problems have occurred over the past week. In this case

(see Figure 4), we’ve isolated the problem down to the Siebel application running in this CICS region. It’s clear

that we’ve had problems with SLA compliance on four separate days this week and judging from the indicators

from the central site data center it looks like there’s a problem in the Web server farm. Further drilldown and

analysis will allow us to confirm this finding.

In summary, there are essentially six key characteristics of any successful dashboard:

• It must include a balanced view of both business and IT metrics customized for the role of the end user using the dashboard. This may include a business executive, an IT manager or IT operations personnel.

• The metrics integrated into any dashboard view must include business metrics that link to strategic business measurement KPIs—whether for an application or a business process itself.

Figure 3: IT Management View of Business Process

Figure 4: IT Management View of Application Status

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• Any successful dashboard must also include relevant, real-time IT metrics that show the impact to the business KPIs being monitored. This is the only way the dashboard user will have a complete understanding of how IT services are impacting business KPIs.

• Dashboards must not only have real-time information, they must also incorporate an intuitive and interactive interface allowing the end user to drill down into relevant and important root cause information.

• Dashboard design and development tools must support fully customizable dashboard views that are tailored to individual end-user roles.

• At the IT manager and IT operations level, dashboards should also include real-time actionable information that allows users to issue relevant commands to the systems and applications being monitored.

I m p l e m e n t i n g a S u c c e s s f u l D a s h b o a r d P r o j e c t Virtually all successful dashboard projects rely upon a series of essential characteristics, without which,

fundamental dashboard usefulness is lost. These characteristics begin with the information upon which the

dashboards are based. Without an integrated, real-time view of applicable IT and business metrics—such as

those provided by a BSM solution from Novell—it’s impossible to put together the balanced view that we’ve

discussed in previous sections. Without real-time access to both the business and the IT metrics already

mentioned, executives and IT managers are missing essential knowledge necessary to make accurate, timely,

and proactive business or IT decisions. We’ll see in a later section, through a real-life example, just how

important an integrated real-time view of IT and business really is.

Are there other technologies besides BSM from Novell that can provide the same integrated view that

executives need? Of course, but when you consider the amount of time, effort, and resources required to pull

together the necessary information—business KPIs, IT systems management, asset and configuration data—it’s

clear why more companies are turning to Novell for BSM today. Not only does Novell® technology provide a

more effective and efficient means to integrate both IT and business metrics, it also visualizes this information in

a consolidated view as a business service. This allows executives and IT managers to see exactly how IT

services are affecting the business.

Once critical integration technology is in place, a successful dashboard project begins with a prototype that

is developed from a vision or evolved from examples of existing dashboards. Dashboard projects will then evolve

in an iterative fashion, changing frequently (in some cases, every 30 to 60 days), to keep pace with changes in

business rules and new sources of data.

Leveraging the vast experience of Novell will accelerate the prototyping process because we’ve had practice

in implementing many dashboard projects for both business and IT organization all over the world. In addition,

Novell can act as a catalyst to further accelerate the dashboard development process even beyond the

prototyping phase, in large part, due to the faster turnaround times we can provide when changes are needed.

Does this mean Novell professional services are necessary for all dashboard projects? The obvious answer

is no; however, most companies will look to software vendors, like Novell, to help with at least initial dashboard

prototypes simply to leverage key expertise and ensure that projects get off to the right start.

According to Forrester Research, dashboard projects should be launched by a line-of-business process

owner like a vice president of customer service or sales. This is because many early dashboard initiatives were

so heavily focused on data and how to report the results of queries interactively that the idea of aligning the

metrics with business processes—and specifically, the owner of the metric—was not even considered.

p. 9

To ensure the needs of the business are properly met, dashboard projects should have a business

executive project head. Just as importantly, dashboard project teams should be limited in size, but should include

representation from the business lines as well as from the IT organization. No matter who ultimately implements

the dashboards defined by the project, it’s essential that there is key representation from both the end users as

well as the information providers (this is usually the IT organization).

A D a s h b o a r d C a s e S t u d y : O n l i n e E - C a r d R e t a i l i n g For any online retail business, high performance and 24X7availability are critical factors to success—both for the

IT service organization as well as for the lines of business who are ultimately responsible for the business bottom

line. How many times have we read in the newspaper about an e-tailer whose Web site went down during peak

business traffic, costing the company millions of dollars in lost revenue opportunity?

On February 14, 2005, the list of companies grew by one more: a major greeting card manufacturer trying to

capture a part of the fast-growing online greeting card market. According to Reuters, “users seeking to pick up or

send…electronic cards… were turned away from the company’s site, which was offline for a large part of the

day.1 “We thought we were ready to handle a huge amount of traffic on Valentine’s Day, we thought wrong,” this

company wrote to its clients saying the Web was flooded by double the expected traffic.

Had this company leveraged an integrated BSM solution featuring IT and executive dashboard visualization,

many of the problems it experienced that day might have been avoided. To see why, let’s start by taking a look at

some of the critical factors that probably came into play.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Web server capacity was an issue; there simply wasn’t

sufficient IT infrastructure to handle the peak loads of that day. However, adding more Web server capacity

doesn’t completely solve the problem. Going forward, what’s to prevent this company from reliving the same

situation because traffic grew beyond expectations, yet again? Next time, the blame shouldn’t rest with IT; it

should reside squarely on the shoulders of business management who, on February 15, 2005, should have

demanded better visibility into IT services and its impact on the business.

One thing remains perfectly clear: The only things separating future success from failure will be sufficient IT

infrastructure capacity, combined with more effective IT service management controls, and coupled with

comprehensive visibility into IT services via executive and IT management dashboards. Let’s walk through a

scenario much like what this company experienced on February 14. We’ll assume a more robust infrastructure

and we’ll further assume essential processes are in place to balance workloads, given sufficient lead-time

through real-time visibility into IT service quality.

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call this company MyCard.com.

MyCard.com—Online E-Card Retailing: A Fresh View It’s 11 o’clock in the morning on Valentine’s Day. The vice president of sales for MyCard.com arrives in his New

York corner office and turns on his laptop to get a better picture of online business. Opening his executive

dashboard view of the online shopping system he sees the following:

1. Reuters, February 16, 2005

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The business indicators depicted in the geographic map of the three major data centers across the country

tell a disturbing story: Revenue is off substantially for the East Coast. At the bottom of the screen it’s easy to get

the business story behind the fall in revenue. The login rate of users trying to gain access to online shopping is

down. Login rate is considered a leading indicator because, in this case, it portends lower order rates. The next

indicator is the cart abandonment rate—the rate at which potential customers are abandoning the items they’ve

selected to purchase before completing their online transactions. An executive in this position would certainly

want to find out why customers are abandoning carts at an abnormally high rate. He doesn’t need to look far—

the online order rate is lower than expected, and the online customer satisfaction rate (the most lagging of these

indicators) is only marginally acceptable.

The culprits for these problems are easy to spot, especially in this integrated view of business metrics and IT

services. By looking at the IT service indicators depicted on the right window pane, it’s easy to see why this

online system is experiencing problems. The first

indication is system availability, which is down from

where it normally should be. The next indicator is

more telling: Transaction volume is way up from

where it normally is, as shown by the “red” pre-set

indicator. This is to be expected on Valentine’s Day,

but given current levels and the time of the day,

there will surely be capacity issues before this day is

through. Problems are especially likely, especially

because the third indicator represented here, system

response time, is running far below acceptable

levels.

Sensing an impending re-occurrence of historical

events, the sales executive calls the lead analyst of IT

operations to discuss the situation. The analyst listens

to the problems sales has encountered and

immediately pulls up her view of IT services— an IT

management dashboard, which looks something like

figure 6.

With one glance at her management dashboard,

it’s evident to the analyst that this problem is not going

to get better unless immediate action is taken. The

business views in the upper half of the dashboard

depict a business process scenario that puts the

bottleneck in the area of the East Coast Web servers. Without re-balancing the load from East-Coast to West-

Coast servers, Web capacity will soon be exhausted. Alerts at the bottom of the screen confirm the bottleneck

and the analyst initiates the commands necessary to “swing” Web site traffic from East Coast to West Coast

servers, thereby removing capacity issues and bringing response times back into line.

Figure 5: Executive Dashboard – MyCard.com

Figure 6: IT Managers Dashboard MyCard.com

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L e v e r a g i n g N o v e l l f o r a S u c c e s s f u l D a s h b o a r d P r o j e c t For years, Novell has provided the technology and professional services necessary to global organizations to

execute successful dashboard projects. During this time, Novell implemented many dashboard projects across a

wide array of vertical industries for both lines of business and IT organizations alike. In fact, all of the dashboard

examples presented in this white paper were modeled after actual customer implementations.

Each of the dashboards represented here rely upon a complex integration of network, systems, or

application management; and asset or configuration data; combined with some form of business information to

provide a complete picture of business health. One of the fundamental core competencies that Novell brings to

the table is a robust suite of integration capabilities. Through BSM technology from Novell, integrating your BMC,

IBM, HP, CA, Mercury, Micromuse, NetIQ, CiscoWorks or other management system environment into one

centralized dashboard view is fast, easy and maintainable. Further, with our BSM technology, integrating

business metrics from virtually any flat file or relational data source gives executives and IT managers alike a

clear and concise view of their business in the context of exactly how IT services are impacting business

success.

Having the right integration technology without a complimentary visualization capability is like having an

instrument panel on an airplane but no window to see outside. The instruments provide instant understanding of

position and will get the pilot to the runway, but without a clear view of the final goal, a successful landing is not

possible. Having dashboard visibility into IT services as they relate to the business is only useful if executives

can intuitively and instantly understand the metrics in the context of their larger goal—achievement of KPIs for

instance. This often requires a complex blend of customized views tailored to individual end users. Novell

integrated dashboard capabilities allow users to implement complex and customized dashboard solutions

through simple point-and-click operations—no scripting is required. Our professional services team has the skill

and knowledge needed to assemble exactly the right components and content to build custom-tailored views

around specific, role-based configurations.

Combining Novell technology with our industry-leading services provides the needed assurance of a

successful dashboard project. Not only has Novell Services established a long track record of successful

implementations, but, in doing

so, we have built an extensive

knowledgebase that can be

leveraged to accelerate

virtually any dashboard

project while lowering risk and

improving the chances of a

successful rollout and

adoption among end users.

Figure 7 depicts the

Novell dashboard project

development lifecycle. As

recommended in earlier

sections of this paper, the Figure 7: Novell Dashboard Project Lifecycle

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lifecycle begins with a prototype—one developed from an existing project, an initial vision, or borrowed from the

wide variety of dashboards implemented by Novell. In this phase, interviews with end users are conducted to

understand how dashboards will be used and which relevant metrics are required for successful business or IT

management. The initial design phase is possibly the most critical phase of any dashboard project. It is here that

early designs can either succeed with early adopters or fall by the wayside like so many other failed projects. It is

critical to have the experience and understanding to know how and why end users use dashboards, as well as to

understand exactly what content they need to see for their particular role in the company.

With a clear vision defined for the initial prototype, developing it is usually accomplished in a short period.

Novell facilitates all phases of project development, from design, to implementation of critical metrics, to crafting

customized role-based views for end users. We work closely with you throughout the dashboard development

lifecycle to ensure that your project is tailored to your specific needs, and that your dashboards are effective and

efficient.

For those companies looking for an experienced vendor capable of providing the technology, services and

experience necessary to deploy a successful dashboard project, Novell is a perfect one-stop source.

Copyright © 2009 Novell, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Novell, the Novell logo and the N logo are registered trademarks of Novell, Inc. in the United States and other countries. *All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 462-002115-001