NeuroPie Solutions

Airport Operational Dashboard

Real-time dashboards are an entirely different category than your standard management dashboard. Their job is to support immediate decision-making. As a result, the information must be easy to interpret, alert users to problems, and make the next action obvious. In addition to key success metrics, real-time dashboards may show detailed data about the action “on the ground.”

Here are some characteristics that can make a real-time dashboard effective:

  • A summary status that indicates how things stand overall. Users need to be able to tell at a glance whether they should worry or not.
  • Reflect a well-understood structure of the business. The design of a real-time dashboard should have a strong theory for how the pieces of the business fit together.
  • Support quick diagnosis of problems. The data presentation should point directly to the likely source of the problem. Real-time dashboards aren’t the place for deep analysis.
  • Simple data presentation. Real-time dashboard’s are not the place for complex or advanced data visualizations.
  • Appropriate time window. The period presented should not be too long, so that users can react to changes quickly enough. On the other hand, very small time windows encourage reactions to changes that may not represent real trends.
  • Prominent but balanced alerts. Naturally, alerting users to problems is a central mission for real-time dashboards.
  • Point to specific action. The application should point users to what they can do about a problem.

Making Data Actionable with Dashboards

Despite huge investments in business intelligence (BI) software and platforms that have resulted in a more informed workforce, most companies still fail to link BI to "the last mile" of business decision making, according to a recent report from Gartner Inc.

The lack of a connection between BI and the decisions it affects has also led to a lack of transparency at many organizations. That prevents BI from getting the full credit it deserves when it results in good decision making.

In the past, the available BI tools required a time-consuming process, as it was generated quarterly, monthly or perhaps weekly. Business performance measurements were therefore restricted to the same time frames. Consequently, not only were decisions made based on historic data, but the reaction time of the business was measured in weeks, at best. With real-time business intelligence the results can be made available immediately - allowing the decision-maker(s) to benefit from actual data.

Many scenarios in business can benefit from a real-time operational dashboard. With different architectures, real-time dashboards cannot be built on top of a traditional BI platform. Operational dashboards allow the organization to manage intraday events and operate at peak performance by identifying changes in the operating environment.