Best Practices to build Dashboards : Focused Insights ( Part 1 )

[SriKrishna]

Focused Insights add an excellent visual layer to the useful data collected by Solution Manager, which can be quickly used to meet the needs of various audience. However, lot of thinking has to go in, while building the dashboards as the dashboards should meet the needs of the users who are using them. If they do not meet the needs or if they do not help them to take actions, they don't use them and look for alternatives.

 

I would like to share my experiences in dashboards which are widely used and address the needs of multiple teams at different levels.

 

** All the images below are created by me, to share my experiences on best practices to drive results from Insights.

Every dashboard we build must help us to take an action based on an observed event, which should provide a positive result.

 

 

Normally a data and insight is confused to be same but they're slightly different. Let's take an example of a simple metric , which measures the CPU utilization of a server every 5minutes.

The 5 minute average CPU is just the raw Data, which cannot be used to take any decision. The moment we plot the raw data into a graph, it gives us an Insight, but without any context like

• what caused the CPU spike , can it be controlled


• what is the trend


• why CPU is under used at any particular time of every day


• Is there any load balancing issues ? etc

A dashboard which just shows the Insight has no meaning and it cannot be communicated effectively to stakeholders without any action items on what needs to be done to address the issue.

So, this Insight dashboard requires another dashboard which can be used to drilldown further, which helps us to take Action .

Once an Action has been taken, the Result needs to be demonstrated in the same dashboard tile or another, that shows the benefit the business had achieved with the Action being taken. The Result could be anything like

• A controlled CPU usage.


• An increase in throughput of Idocs for example


• A reduction in Job runtime etc.

So, the dashboard needs to help users to drive decision making using the insights generated, which helps businesses to optimize their SAP processes.

In a series of blogposts, i will be sharing how the Insights are converted to actions which helped to improve business processes on various metrics.

 

Thank you.

More Details on Focused Insights : https://support.sap.com/en/alm/focused-insights.html