PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer

Updated: 2009-04-30

Dashboard Designer is the desktop application that creates and manages dashboards and their elements, including scorecards, parameters, and strategy maps. Dashboards help organizations measure, monitor, and manage business performance with live data from a variety of business data sources. Dashboard Designer can track key performance indicators (KPIs) that consolidate data from multiple data sources into a scorecard or strategy map that is visual, intuitive, and interactive.

After you complete your dashboards, you can use Dashboard Designer to publish them to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, or you can import them directly into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.

Dashboard Designer lets you easily create and manage the following views and elements:

• Scorecard elements   Individual elements of any given scorecard.

• **Key performance indicators (KPIs)   **Business metrics that help decision-makers at all levels of an organization monitor progress toward meeting organizational performance goals. By using data directly from a data source, KPIs can measure an organization's performance in a specific area, such as total sales, parts inventory, or sales per region. KPIs can provide a logical and comprehensive way of describing organizational strategy when organizational stakeholders carefully plan which KPIs to use in their dashboards.

• **Data sources   **The actual data that Dashboard Designer KPIs use. Data sources include relational databases; online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes; Excel spreadsheets; SharePoint lists; or any other Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), Excel Services, or ADOMD.NET data source.

• **Indicators   **Graphical representations of the status of a KPI or dashboard when it is compared to a destination. Indicators translate numeric values into colors and icons to emphasize and clarify the status.

• **Dashboards   **Mechanisms that display hierarchical arrangements of KPIs. Dashboard Designer lets you define multiple filters for a dashboard, such as filters defined over time, by geography, or against different KPI destinations. When you publish dashboards to a SharePoint site, users can navigate them by using page filters and drill-up/drill-down functionality.

• **Reports   **Reports are forms that provide supporting data, such as detailed charts, Pivot Tables, spreadsheets, and SQL Server reports that are based on dashboard data. These reports can present data that is not sourced from dashboard data sources, such as spreadsheets and Web pages. They can be connected to dashboards so that selections made in the dashboard determine what is displayed in the report. Examples include:

  • Strategy maps   Models of how an organization will create value. Create a strategy map in Microsoft Visio 2007 and then insert it into Dashboard Designer to show how a performance goal will be achieved.

  • Trend analysis reports   Forms that show the historical performance of data in a dashboard. These reports include the option to use SQL Server data-mining algorithms to generate projections on future data values.

Download this book