Finally, proof that there are people out there that understand what a dashboard is supposed to deliver.
Some time ago, APMigest published Five Dashboard Must-Haves for BSM, by Steve Tack of Compuware. What he has to say are guiding concepts anyone delivering dashboards (or any reasonable facsimile thereof) should follow.
Pay particular attention to his comments about “role-relevant views”. So many of the top-level screens I see assume the viewer is a technician, which is almost certainly not the case. For example, an international webcast from a major vendor recently showed screens that were 95% completely technical in nature, and as a result were unintelligible to anyone else.
This misses the point entirely. If we are not going to deliver information a business manager can understand, why do we call it “Service Management” in the first place?
The technical information is useful, as it answers the “Why?” question, as in “Why is my widget factory out of commission?”
However, Service Management is not about the “Why?”, it is about the “What?” The goal is to take the information we have about monitored technology elements, and translate that into the current impact on the business, so that a business manager can understand and act to correct the problem.
Furthermore, this idea of “What?” is entirely relative, since it is based on whom you (the viewer) are. Since Service Management is not a solution we deliver to a systems administrator, why do we insist on demonstrating, building, and delivering dashboards whose top-level view requires those skills just to get started? (It gets worse from there.)
Service Management helps us understand using the “view-at-a-glance” top level that the widget factory is what is impacted, and the reason why is only visible as we drill down further: the supply chain order inventory server went down due to a process failure.
Notice the “What?” part of this is a “widget factory”. That is an entity the business manager understands on so many levels, and one that may have no meaning at all to a technician.
Dashboards should present initial views which make sense to the business management audience, then provide additional detail if the viewer wants or needs to know more. This is the correct way to accommodate the different needs of team members in different roles.
Next time, we’ll discuss the underlying reasons this information is relevant to the business manager. You already know the reasons, but you may not have thought to orient your dashboard to show you the information that makes it all possible.
At Epsilogix, we understand all this, and we know how to deliver it, because we’ve done it before. If you find yourself confused by what we (and Steve Tack) are talking about, or wonder about the difference between what you’ve been seeing everywhere and what we are talking about here, call us. The difference will open your eyes.