SYSK 225: Portals, Dashboards, Scorecards…

In case of portals, the story is reasonably clear. I think most would agree that the goal of portals is to provide users with integrated access to relevant business information. The key words here are: access, integrated and relevant. So, it’s a “one stop shopping” for information gathered from structured (databases, etc.) and unstructured (e-mails, lists, documents, etc.) data from disparate sources across the enterprise. To support this goal, good portals come with indexing and full-text search across all these data sources, comprehensive collaboration support, and are, in a sense, a launching pad for other applications, web sites, etc.

 

But when talking about dashboards and scorecards, the differences become a bit less clear. Recently, I came across a white paper titled “The essential guide to analytic dashboards”. The author (Aaron Solomon) has made it as clear as it gets, in my opinion. Here is a chart from his paper:

 

Characteristic	Portal	Dashboard	Scorecard
Business benefit	Provides central gateway to a company’s intranet and applications	Enables monitoring of current business status and tactical decision making	Displays overall progress executing against strategic goals
Business users	Entire organization	Managers of operations and business functions	Executives, long-term decision makers
Timeframe of data	Varies	Short (minutes, hours, 1 day)	Long (days, months, year)
Relative data latency	Varies	Low	Medium
Integrates into portals	NA	Yes	Yes

 

Given these definitions, a dashboard is best fit for tracking key performance indicators at a tactical level, for measuring performance and analyzing data via a relatively structured, analytic view. A dashboard often is incorporated into a portal.

A scorecard is a great tool for aligning user activities to key strategic objectives. 

 

I encourage you to read Aaron’s white paper by visiting http://www.windowsitpro.com/cluster/docs/products/1/3/Proclarity_EG.pdf.