Planning the dashboard

When you are planning a dashboard, ask yourself several questions. Because a dashboard is based on a report pack, some of those questions will apply to the report pack when you create it.

Before you begin

Questions you should answer include:
  • Who is going to see the dashboard?
  • What issues are they interested in? Issues correspond to reports, so you need to choose which reports to add to the report pack and then which of those reports will you add to the dashboard.
  • Will you have one dashboard showing all issues or many dashboards, each focused on a single issue or a group of related issues?
  • What regions of your website do you want to show results from?

Procedure

  1. Determine which report packs to include. The report packs will define what issue data the dashboard contains, and what its scope will be, such as which regions of your site will be portrayed. If you add a report pack that does not contain the issues you are interested in, it takes up valuable space on the dashboard without contributing to the results. The dashboard will have to be rerun to remove it.
  2. Decide which reports will contribute to the dashboard. You might not want all the reports from a report pack to appear in one dashboard or in one tab of the dashboard.
  3. Choose the dashboard display method.
  4. Decide if you will link dashboards together. A corporate dashboard might link to another dashboard that shows the issues from a particular area of your website. When you create a tab for the dashboard, you define whether it links to another dashboard or not.
  5. Determine who should have access to the dashboard data and who should not.
  6. Create the dashboard.