Comments on: Fighting IT? Prototype an Executive Dashboard in Excel

By: Ulrich Seidl

Ulrich Seidl — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:03:19 +0000

our experiences were really good and accepted by IT and management end users when we used excel on top of a multidimensional OLAP database which received its data from an ERP system. Data and structures managed by IT and reports created and used by end user and/or IT analysts.

By: Nilesh

Nilesh — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:58:11 +0000

BI tools are all good and capable but they are always wrapped around corporate policy.

If you believe in data governance, then Excel is not the way to present information. There are lot of parameters that go around defining Data governance, data security etc. Excel is good for prototyping and it should be used just for that. The prototype should be passed to the IT team and let them build it using their BI application.

By: Are Excel Charts Hurting Your Business? 10 Mistakes You Should Avoid.

Are Excel Charts Hurting Your Business? 10 Mistakes You Should Avoid. — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:11:45 +0000

[...] Most people aren’t aware of how powerful Excel is and use it almost as a pocket calculator. If you routinely have to manage quantitative data, learning a little more Excel always pays off. As an example, you can use it to create complex executive dashboards or, at least, as a dashboard prototyping tool. [...]

By: Finance Gal

Finance Gal — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:28:26 +0000

Ahhahaha… Jorge, I completely agree. I am in the middle of one such.. uh.. ‘collaboration’. IT hasn’t yet given me ODBC access yet, and I just know that I could create some good dashboards for use in specific situations that arise, say, once in a month or once a quarter, for which it is unnecessary to use IT resources or reinvent the wheel but which is completely vital when we need to make a financial decision. Scrambling around last minute to get your BI tools to give you the answers, or in the usual case, exporting from BI into Excel (!) to calculate the answer, can be avoided with dashboards.

My thoughts on it being a fad – not as long as Excel 2007 and VBA are still alive and people with graduate degrees in Finance and Accounting still think of Excel spreadsheets as a chore instead of thinking of ways to make Excel work for them. Pivot tables are a mystery, VBA is another government agency and the extent of formula knowledge is composing a nested-IF statement. How can dashboards be a fad if they haven’t even permeated all the organizations yet?

By: Jorge Camoes

Jorge Camoes — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:24:33 +0000

@Tom: I can’t agree with you, for obvious reasons. Data visualization allows you to manage and get insights from large datasets. This is note a fad. Now, you can call that dashboards and some time in the near future you can call it something else, but the basic principles remain. And a business is much more that the IT infrastructure.

By: Tom in IT

Tom in IT — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:39:39 +0000

Dashboards are just plain stupid. Like the Corporate Mission Statement before them, and the “quality” and “excellence” programs that Corporate American has wasted their money on in the past, dashboards too will fade away with time. Executives would be better off listening to their IT departments who know far more about the business than their little junior executives. What a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.

By: How to create an Excel Dashboard

How to create an Excel Dashboard — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:52:12 +0000

[...] executive reporting. It allows for fast, flexible and cost-effective dashboard implementation (or prototyping). Intermediate Excel users should be able to design and implement an executive dashboard in a [...]

By: “Business-IT Chasm”: The Business Perspective. « Roman Stanek’s Push-Button Thinking

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:03:45 +0000

[...] is the link to the full post. Posted in Work. Tags: BI, chasm, [...]

By: Bernard Lebelle

Bernard Lebelle — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:23:06 +0000

As pointed out by the Forrester Group in april 07, “Ouch! Get Ready — Spreadsheets Are Here To Stay For Business Intelligence” – Excel remain one of the major tools for management & dashboard reporting – http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,41687,00.html

This report was one of the reasons I wrote my book “Construire un tableau de bord pertinent sous Excel” (ie « How to build an efficient dashboard with Excel » released in France end of 2007. Companies and managers at all levels (from CEO downward) are now facing the challenge of having near instantaneous dashboard capability in order to face the tough questions from above (ie shareholders, CEO, CxO and the top management downward).

That being said, we all know there is a wide range of enterprise out there, from small-home based business up to Fortune 500 companies. Not all of them have the resources and funds to have top of the line BI tools and IT staff.

Even in those few (compared to the overall number of companies) that do, when there is a need for a new dashboard there is no guarantee that it can be “reconfigured” quickly in existing dashboard / reporting tool already managed and supported by the IT department. Doing it in Excel always seems to be the shortest way.

I concur with Jorge on using Excel for a prototype an executive dashboard. On many occasion, as a consultant, I helped companies devised such Excel-based dashboard prototype, even for CEO level. This shouldn’t be considered as a threat by IT Department as long as the following guidelines are followed:
• Data are extracted from reliable sources with the help of IT whenever required to ensure integrity
• Data transformation (whether in Excel or Access, or any other tool) is performed and documented
• Excel dashboard architecture is designed to ensure smooth compilation and prevent data-loss and data corruption (separating data storage from calculation from printouts)
• Proper documentation is performed and a “technical manual” is reviewed and validated by someone from the IT department
• The “expected lifetime” of such prototype is discussed between business stakeholders with IT being involved in this process.
o This is perhaps one of the most critical aspects of the topic to avoid “World War 1” syndrome described in the posts above.
o Dashboards will have to pass the “acid-test” of daily/weekly/monthly usage.
o Adaptations will be required whether simply adding extra data / indicators, reformatting graphic based information visualization or performing additional computations such as rolling 3 month trends… Excel flexibility in that “usage based refinement” stage is fantastic

All that being said once this prototyping phase is finished, bringing IT onboard to study full scale deployment even on non Excel based technology must be performed.

By: David Gerbino

David Gerbino — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:48:33 +0000

I have a totally different view. The IT department is only a service bureau. I, as a data analyst, whether being a marketing analyst or a financial analyst, is beholden to all company and regulatory agency rules, not to mention budgetary constraints. That being said, I know the data, the business rules and how do use it. IT does not. It is not the function of the IT department to know how to do such things. Even if they have programmers who are going to create Enterprise reporting, they have to follow the business owner’s specifications. That means Finance, Marketing, Operations, etc. have to tell IT how to do what they will program. IT does not know the first thing about data visualization, the proper way to show a time series, how to calculate the daily average average balance, and stuff like that. The BI and Marketing Database projects I am currently involved in are controlled by the business unit owners. IT is not a business unit owner so they have no input in business matters. I rely on my IT group to make sure the products I am evaluating will work in their infrastructure and my Security/Risk group to make sure the companies I am dealing with are safe to deal with. When this works, it works great. As somebody said above we are all in this together.

Having said all that, I have worked at companies in the past where the IT departments were out of control and it negatively affected the bottom line.

So how does prototyping Dashboards in Excel relate? Simple, it is one of the most powerful engines to create very sophisticated dashboards given the proper tools. Microsoft gave Excel powerful connectivity underpinnings (just as Lotus did 1-2-3 before Excel) to analyze data. So if you have hundreds, thousands, millions, or more records to analyze and want a dashboard and a framework for adhoc analysis, Excel is an amazing tool.

My favorite weapons I used with Excel over the years:
New Fav – XLCubed (just testing now)
MicroCharts (have been testing since beta)
Spark Lines for Excel at http://sparklines-excel.blogspot.com/
Cognos OLAP and Reporting tools
plain old ODBC connection to my data

@dmgerbino