As business intelligence moves into the computer age, corporate dashboards are becoming a necessity in business intelligence technology. Although business intelligence has used corporate dashboards for years, their popularity has increased greatly due to the change and advancement in the technology used. However, with the great amount of information available, there are some key design issues to consider if you want to use corporate dashboards for your business intelligence.

If you want to design an effective corporate dashboard for your business intelligence technology, you will need to decide on some design goals. You will need to think about the function and look of your corporate dashboard as it relates to the type of business intelligence you are trying to put together. Some corporate dashboards are flashy reports and others are more like strategic scorecards. Other corporate dashboards are used for business intelligence that is more tactical, using relevant and actionable data. Your corporate dashboard will need an efficient design that fits the business intelligence role.

There are two essentials to understanding how to build a corporate dashboard for business intelligence, metrics and key performance indicators. Metrics are direct numerical measures to represent certain types of business intelligence in the relationship of at least one dimension. For instance, you could take the metric of gross sales and show it by day or week in the financial quarter. The business intelligence can be shown in your corporate dashboard in both a dynamic and static way to use various types of analysis of the business intelligence.

You will also need to consider what key performance indicators the users of the corporate dashboard will be responsible for managing. A key performance indicator is the measure that tells the relative performance in relation to the target goal. Some key performance indicator gives you concrete business intelligence, while others will give you business intelligence in the abstract. Defining the key performance indicators is extremely important to the overall design, because it defines the foundation of the business intelligence that will be visualized in the corporate dashboard. Key performance indicators help show the business intelligence through alert icons, traffic lights, trend icons, progress bards, and gauges.

Supporting analytics are also important to designing your corporate dashboard as it relates to your business intelligence. You will need to pick out the information that a user will need to see in order to tell the condition of the key performance indicator. Supporting analytics offer context and diagnostic information to know why a key performance indicator is showing specific information. These supporting analytics, as they relate to business intelligence, come more in the form of traditional charts, graphs, and tables.

Read the rest of the article here: Business Intelligence.