In the previous post I talked about the definition of ROI for a dashboard which is
Time spent on developing an automated dashboard / Time spent on developing it manually
Now consider an example of developing an Employee Hours dashboard where you want to track the number of hours spent by employees on various projects
The IT team has made the data available to everyone so the Finance, Projects ,and Consulting divisions start work on developing the dashboard independently as each one of them has a requirement to track employee hours
Now we have 3 dashboards which are 80% alike in terms of content and the KPI’s they produce
So what is the ROI of the Employee Hours dashboard ? The dashboard here is not one particular workbook but the theme “Tracking employee hours on various projects”
so by this definition all three dashboards meet this criterion and are grouped as one
So @120 hours per dashboard the ROI = 360/172 = 2.1 which is a negative ROI
Duplication of work is one of the biggest issues facing companies today when they are deploying a self service BI solution.
Next time you want to develop a dashboard think about it being part of the wider deployment and not as an individual piece of work