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Cubist designed its first dashboard with some help from the analytical tool DecisionSite, from Spotfire Inc., a Somerville, Mass.-based software company. Indeed, many companies choose to build their own dashboards rather than buy configured dashboard software -- 64%, according to a recent survey by Ventana Research -- because CIOs doubt they can find the metrics for their business in a box. "We haven't yet had a need come up where we've said, 'We can't build it,'" Murabito says.
The leading BI vendors -- Business Objects, Cognos, Information Builders and SAS Institute, according to Gartner's latest BI Magic Quadrant -- all offer dashboard building tools and are clamoring for midmarket customers, as are the largest enterprise application companies. In April, Oracle Corp. revamped its BI package with the addition of analytics tools it acquired with its purchase of Siebel Systems and began marketing a suite aimed squarely at the midmarket. At the same time, Microsoft acquired partner ProClarity Inc. to bolster its analytics offerings and target midsized firms. Plenty of smaller vendors such as Arcplan Inc., based in Wayne, Penn., are focused solely on providing dashboards and scorecards.
"Most dashboards are built rather than bought," Eckerson says. "But that's changing as vendors offer more robust dashboards and scorecard tools," he says.
Ventana survey respondents complained about difficulty in defining key performance indicators, or KPIs, an inability to change perspectives on the fly and trouble sharing reported metrics with other applications such as Microsoft's PowerPoint. Ideally, any performance alert should allow a user to drill down, find a root cause and take corrective action. To that end, Snow believes many IT shops are neglecting out-of-the-box dashboard software that can extend capabilities as their companies and the number of applications and employees grow.
Regardless of approach, IT executives need to realize that building a dashboard isn't a onetime thing. Once users see what it can do, they ask for all kinds of data to be connected to it. At EMS, Neville plans to keep integrating new data sources during the next couple of years. "It's not necessarily like the old data warehouse," he says. "The challenge I'm also talking about is being able to integrate different pieces of information that may come from different systems or places. But it all may live in a 2-by-2 world on a Web page."
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