Learn the difference between the traditional 'Analytics Dashboards' and the revolutionary 'Business Dashboards'. The traditional dashboards provide a snapshot of a single moment in time. These data-driven dashboards are designed to provide insight through analytics. Business Dashboards, on the other hand, are a new and innovative type of dashboards that clearly visualize what is happening with the business at a glance. Business dashboards rely on four key components for delivering business outcomes or impacts which are Data, Business Intelligence & Analytics, Business Process Management, and Corporate Performance Management. Read more here: https://goo.gl/s9TfDJ Acknowledgment: Originally written by Tor Inge Vasshus for the Whitepaper titled "Business Dashboards" published by Corporater. Read the exclusive Whitepaper here - http://bit.ly/2lqfmyT

1. BUSINESS DASHBOARDS
DASHBOARDS THAT GO BEYOND INSIGHTS BY DELIVERING IMPACT
TOR INGE VASSHUS
W H I T E P A P E R

2. Introduction
The C-suite requires dashboards that clearly visualize what is happening with the
business — at a glance. Business needs to understand overall performance, if it is
on-track with its plans, and what areas need improvement. However, there are several
problems with delivering this type of information using traditional technology, such as
dashboards. Most traditional dashboards provide a snapshot of a single moment in time.
These data-driven dashboards are often designed to provide insight through analytics.
While they can be excellent tools at visualizing data for this purpose, they are not
designed to deliver impact, or business outcomes
Impact-driven dashboards
Corporater offers a new and innovative type of dashboard, called a business dashboard.
These dashboards rely on four key components for delivering business outcomes or
impacts. These key components are as follows:
• Data— evidence for decision-making
• Business intelligence and analytics— tools used for data exploration, discovery, and
visualization
• Business process management— a framework for handling business rules,
workflow, exceptions, and processes
• Corporate performance management— a general framework for handling the
business model throughout the entire organization, at strategic, tactical, and
operational levels
Why traditional dashboards fall short of delivering business
impacts
Data availability
Traditional data dashboards are typically designed to visualize and analyze data, for the
purpose of providing data insights. They are limited to fixed data dimensions, and
typically visualize what is available in a data warehouse. While many companies have
mandates to store all critical business information in a centralized data warehouse where
it can serve as a single source of truth, reality is often very different. The business is
often actually run by a patchwork of supplemental spreadsheets, or through isolated
systems, files, and databases that are stitched together to provide managers with what
they really need to make decisions.
Evidence Analysis Processes Business
A new type of Dashboards: Business dashboards
BUSINESS DASHBOARDS
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WHITEPAPER
BI&A BPM CPM
Business
Outcomes

3. BUSINESS DASHBOARDS
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WHITEPAPER
This common phenomenon says less about dashboards, and more about the reality of
running a business: businesses require business agility and flexibility when it comes to
data and information. But it also highlights how and why data dashboards are poorly
suited for use as management tools.
Corporater offers business dashboards, on a business management platform, that enable
companies to fill in the data gaps by providing easy to use web forms, surveys, and
spreadsheet uploads. If a customer needs to report on data that is not available in their
data warehouse, they can easily create inputs for the data, manually, and even offer
process support through schedulers and workflows to send reminders and notifications.
Corporater also captures qualitative data, such as commentary, evaluative data,
mitigating statements, suggestions, proposed actions, and supporting document
attachments. Most organizations completely underestimate the volume and use of such
information, as it is typically used or reported manually, or 'on the side' of traditional
data reporting tools. By integrating all data, including qualitative and evaluative
information, customers no longer need to manually cut and paste management reports
together.
Data quality
There is little doubt that data dashboards are rich in functionality and are highly capable
of visualizing data. However, these data dashboards are only as good as the underlying
data that they visualize. Most companies face major challenges in data quality. There
are any number of reasons for data quality issues. Some may be simply logistical, where
some portions of the company where recently acquired, and they rely on different
reporting systems. In other cases, the data might not go through a quality or validation
process.
A business dashboard offers additional layers of process support, if needed. Corporater
can visualize the data quality or completeness during your reporting cycles, in addition
to the data itself. This makes it very clear to those consuming the data whether it is
complete or in a provisional, incomplete state. Data review and approval processes can
be configured, to keep provisional data out of sight until it is approved.
Lack of business process support
Rules ultimately drive business management. Whether explicitly defined or not, they are
everywhere in business. They are run at every level, from the strategic, down to the
daily operational level. Data dashboards are generally quite limited in their process
support capabilities.
Corporater offers a business management platform, where process support is a key
element. The platform can automate system tasks or system maintenance activities,
such as controlling the lifecycle of objects within the business dashboards, opening or
closing reporting periods, and preserving a performance history across time at both the
object and metadata levels.

4. BUSINESS DASHBOARDS
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Rules and conditions about where and when content should appear can be configured to
provide conditional-based reports, exception handling, alerts, and notifications.
Approvals, checklists, and commentary can also be used to enrich the analytics and
reporting processes. For example, discoveries or insights gained from the data can be
captured and archived in the system, and can trigger and be linked to follow-up actions,
projects, or plans. Entire decision processes and prioritization exercises can be modeled
and tracked. These business processes can be connected to the business impacts they
deliver.
Lack of business context
Analytics tools are intended to produce data insights. As discovery tools, they are
designed to explore data, typically through ad-hoc selection and filtering of data sets.
What they typically lack is a context related to the business. For example, if a
dashboard visualizes KPIs or performance metrics, these metrics are often rows in tables.
They are not rich pages with commentary, performance history, purpose, or a linkage to
strategy or a business model. There is generally no built-in navigation or linkages to
other business units or other reporting periods. Rather, these business dimensions are
simply filters on the dashboard.
Corporater's business dashboards offer users a clear business context. The business unit,
reporting period, and business model information is clearly visible on each page, and
navigation is automatically available. By linking the business context directly to the
data, users receive much greater benefits from the insights they achieve during data
exploration: they understand the history of the data, how the values compare to
targets, the status, the trend, commentary and evaluative information related to the
results, the data source, the purpose and guidelines for conducting analysis, and any
other useful information or context needed to start making an impact on the business.
Multiple business models can also be connected. Business objectives can be monitored
and assessed through KPIs and metrics, and linked to performance improvement
initiatives, risks, compliance activities or through other models.
Lack of business agility
While many data dashboards make bold claims to be business friendly, the fact remains
that they are generally configured and managed as technology tools, by skilled IT
resources. While the end use of the dashboards is well-suited to business users,
dashboard design and data modeling remain out of reach. This is why spreadsheets
remain so popular with business users, despite their many limitations and drawbacks.
Corporater offers a different approach with its business dashboards, by placing business
users in the driver's seat—as both the end users, and as masters of its configuration. The
bulk of the configuration consists of business-level activities. A common business
metadata library is configured, as are the business objects that reflect the customer's
business model. These building blocks can be configured in a wide variety of ways to a
vast variety of management or business models, including general performance
management, individual performance management, risk management, governance and
compliance, project and portfolio management, traditional corporate performance
management, quality improvement, and more.
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In addition to the flexibility on modeling options, the system is designed with the
assumption that the content and structure will change over time. A fundamental
expectation is that business conditions will change, and the management model will
evolve to adapt to those changes—both within the system, and through the related
business activities. For this reason, the history of the metrics, business objects, and
even the metadata is maintained. Users can see at a glance what a project looked like
at any point in time.
Accountability and activity management
Data dashboards focus on the data, and not on the consumers of the data. Typically, at
best, users are referenced through the access control system, or through personalized
settings of the dashboards. This further illustrates how data dashboards are not designed
to deliver business impact, but rather they are designed to deliver insights.
Corporater's business dashboards offer tools to help organizations plan and execute
outcomes, based on data insights. The dashboards offer functionality to manage and
monitor strategic activities, projects, and initiatives, and to assign accountability along
the way. For example, customers can identify problem areas in quality, analyze root
causes for the problem area, then develop quality improvement projects. These projects
can include cost and impact studies for use in project prioritization. They can be run
through an approval cycle, and once activated, can be reported, monitored, and
continually re-evaluated. Even the final impact or result can be analyzed to evaluate if
it achieved its intended outcome, and whether it was delivered on time, and on budget.
Individuals can also easily see all the activities they are accountable for, in user-based
dashboards. They can maintain oversight into outstanding tasks, activities, forms, data
entries, initiatives, or anything that might require their attention.
Process support
Process support generally falls out of scope within data dashboards. It is simply regarded
as a separate domain. Corporater's business management platform is designed to fully
support key management processes. These processes can include the various workflow
related to collecting and approving manual data, or commenting or evaluating the
insights gained during data analysis, general management reporting processes, and even
management meetings. These can be coordinated and automated using a powerful
business workflow engine. Business rules can be modeled to automatically highlight
deviations and problem areas, so managers can spend more time focusing on delivering
better outcomes, and less time focusing on the underlying data.
Beyond data
While data is very important to today's businesses, data, when taken alone, doesn't tell
the whole story. This is where a business dashboard delivers its value. It ties together
the entire business, from the data, to the analytics, to the management processes, and
the overall business framework, to tell a comprehensive story, in its relevant context.
This story can take the organization from data insights, through the decision-making
processes, planning, and execution to deliver overall business impact. As a metaphor, if
data are the threads, the business management platform is a richly woven tapestry that
offers a roadmap for achieving the desired business outcomes and impacts.
WHITEPAPER

6. Business Solution
Technology Stack
Visualization& Dashboards
Data warehouse
Integration
Gap
DATABI&A
WHITEPAPER
Gap
Gap
Gap
Report oriented/ HTML report
Allows you to explore a data model/ DB/ Cube
The report has filters (org, time, product etc.), and
there might be sub reports linked to the dashboards
Focuses on Analyzing data
Deviations in structures is handled by workarounds
and coding
Stand alone
Business model oriented/ configuration
Allows you to explore a business model
The model has model depth, and each of the
business objects represents business functionality
Focuses on Analyze, Plan, and Execute
Deviations is handled in the business modelling
configuration
Often an integrated part of a holistic business
orchestration platform
BI Tools Corporater
Analytical Dashboard Business Dashboard
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Understanding the differences between dashboard types
Building better business solutions
There is a very high failure rate in attempting to use a technology stack to develop a
business solution. Business intelligence tools aim to provide data insights and to
visualize data through dashboards. They lack the critical functionality needed to deliver
business impact. It is very expensive to fill these gaps using custom development.

7. Key questions to ask in order to achieve a successful business solution:
• Every business solution is built on a business framework – how well is this
supported?
• End users expect easy navigation and content-rich solution pages where they can
interact. How well is this supported?
• Can comments, assessments, and evaluations be added?
• If you want to act on and fix a business problem, does the solution support
activities and initiatives. Can you assign responsibility?
• An often-overlooked reality is that some of the necessary information is in not
available in any database. How easily can manual data be collected?
• Sometimes, rather than analyzing and exploring content, you want information to
find you. Can you specify rules in the system to receive notifications, reminders,
and alerts on important issues?
• How are access control, workflow, collaboration, approval processes, and
document generation supported?
• Is the solution out of the box- or custom development?
Delivering business impacts with Corporater
As an integrated business management platform, with Corporater you have all the
building blocks needed to provide a comprehensive management solution. And if you
have already invested in business intelligence and analytics tools, you can receive the
best of both worlds—and embed your analytics inside Corporater, where it has the
business context and all the benefits offered by a business solution.
• Business
• Business solution
• Structure, content, objects, model
• Descriptive and qualitative information
• Assessment and verbal input
• Business model frameworks
• Decision making
• Audit, governance
• Decision library
• Accountability
• Collaboration
• Augmented knowledge management
• Process
• Actions and initiatives
• Notifications
• Decision rule execution engine
• Workflow
• Analytics
• Industry benchmarks/ benchmarking clearing houses
• Comparative benchmarks
• Data
• Manual data input/ writeback
• Access control and user rights to the solution
• Approval of content/ data/ model
• Business Meta-data
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Business Solution
Technology Stack
Visualization& Dashboards
Data warehouse
Integration
DATABI&A
Process and Execution
BPM
Business
CPM
Gap

8. BUSINESS DASHBOARDS
WHITEPAPER
Tor Inge Vasshus is an all-round Enterprise Performance Management
professional:
• An experienced practitioner of management framework such as balanced
scorecard
• Consultant and advisor to enterprises using these framework
• Dynamic speaker on performance management at conferences and universities
worldwide
• An innovative software solution provider to enterprises that aspire performance
excellence
Tor Inge holds a master degree in finance and entrepreneurship from the University of
Stavanger, Norway. He is a regular guest lecturer at the university.
Author
Tor Inge Vasshus
Founder and CEO
Corporater
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Please contact us for more information and a demonstration.
sales@corporater.com
www.corporater.com
company/corporater
Corporater is a global software company that empowers organizations to evaluate,
manage, and continually improve business performance by providing a business
management platform that adapts to a client’s unique business model, out of the box.
in