Dashboards speed efficiency

Some employees at Wells Fargo & Co. will be glancing at their dashboards in the next few months, but it won't be to see how fast they're driving.

These dashboards are on their computer screens and will show how Wells Fargo's money management business is going.

A dashboard is a computer screen full of view-at-a-glance customized data that combines numbers, bright-colored good-or-bad indicators and pie charts. Clicking on any item brings forth more detailed information, drawn from corporate and outside databases around the country.

"The amount of data we have access to keeps growing by leaps and bounds every year, and the bigger it gets, the harder it is to sift through," said David Schwietz, brokerage technology manager and vice president at Wells Fargo's 7,000-employee wealth management group, based in Minneapolis, which handles personal investments. "Dashboards allow us to present data in visual fashion that makes it more intuitive and useful, so our people can find what interests them, then drill down into the data to find out more."

The Wells Fargo dashboards are designed by iBusiness Solutions, a Bloomington consulting firm with six full-time and four part-time employees that combines its own ideas about information presentation with readily available commercial dashboard software. At Wells Fargo, the intent was to highlight the current company performance of a specific region, product or employee, said Tim Brands, iBusiness president.

"We help companies understand what metrics to look at, what data they need to collect, and how to make it visual," Brands said.

Brands said iBusiness has annual revenue of about $1 million, and typically charges $100,000 to $200,000 for dashboard projects lasting several months. The firm used to resell dashboard software from Hyperion, now a unit of Oracle Corp., but shifted toward consulting as a better way for a small company to compete.

"With our dashboards, you never see more than three of four things at once, because the average person can't assimilate more data than that at one time," said John Spader, president of 40-employee Spader Business Management, a Sioux Falls, S.D., financial services firm that uses iBusiness dashboards with clients ranging from furniture retailers to snowmobile dealers. "People can always take it further by clicking on the icons, in some cases going 25 to 50 layers of information deep."

Other iBusiness customers include the administrators of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, which use "accountability dashboards" to show the public how individual schools measure up in categories such as enrollment, tuition and employment of graduates.

Beneath the dashboard's simple-looking surface things are a lot more complicated, Brands said. The secret is to know how information flows within a company, such as what database to get the information from and when to get it. For example, a public company might want its dashboard to show sales in the closing days of a financial quarter, he said. At Wells Fargo, the dashboard will draw its summary data from about eight different databases throughout the company.

While the concept of dashboarding has been around for two decades -- it used to be called executive information systems -- it's easier to do now because of better software and ubiquitous use of the Internet to deliver information, Brands said. While dashboarding also bears a superficial resemblance to data mining -- combing through databases to find related information -- dashboards are quicker to use and less detailed.

"Data mining is like looking for gold; you're not sure if what you're looking for is there," Brands said. "With dashboarding, you're looking for a certain number of predefined, but important business metrics."