The Role of Digital Dashboards Research Assignment (Term Paper Sample)

The Role of Digital Dashboards in Supporting Decision-Making Organizations
Introduction
A digital dashboard is a widely known type of business intelligence tool that acts as customized Microsoft Office 2000. The digital dashboard is vital in most business set-ups and organizations since it offers solutions for knowledge workers by consolidating corporate, personal or team information (Aliy, 2011). In fact, this is enhanced by a single click access as an analytical and collaborative tool. This technique brings a company’s information source to the individual desktop thus, enabling improved decision-making. Additionally, this is achieved by availing instant access to the intellectual assets of the organization.
In today’s business operations, human, and intellectual capital are critical aspects in most organizations. In fact, the most prominent companies in the US and across the globe are capitalizing on developing technology and practices aimed at managing information and knowledge. Evidence suggests that the management and executive have discovered that the companies, whose work environments reward cooperative and information-sharing, are gaining a competitive edge over their competitors. Though knowledge workers are faced with the responsibility of escalating the amount of information in organization, it is vital since they are availing information that is needed to assess the changing shape in the marketplace (Buijs & Wortmann, 2014).
It is the role of the technologist data in most organizations to avail the executive with a wealth of information from credible sources. Though these people have been availing enormous data, there has been a problem in assimilating it. This is because though the executive has plenty of information, there should be a tool that facilitates the filtration of the information and customizing it to ensure that it meets the desired needs (Hadden, n.d).
Without adequately managing the knowledge assets, organizations cannot operate profitably nor can they grow effectively. In fact, failure to properly handle information results to prolonged work, trends go unnoticed, incomplete jobs are created, repetition of tasks, and loss of information lessons go unlearned among others. This implies that knowledge management and technologies processes are vital since they help to prepare the organizations for a dynamic business environment (Nkunika, 2015). This is done by ensuring that employees have the information and the expertise needed to not only assess but also act upon the viable business opportunities.
As digital dashboards provide the ability and a pathway through which knowledge employees outlook their daily undertakings, get feedback on the organization performance, and share with workers, it has profound effects on the priority of the workers. For instance, if digital dashboard is used to provide notifications and ratings on customer’s satisfaction, there is a high likelihood that workers involved will be more sensitive to such issues (Kawamoto & Mathers, 2007). This portrays a digital dashboard as a tool through which executive or management can direct the attention of a business. As the advantages of a digital dashboard are portrayed through the easy availability of significant information, they are also acting as catalysts enhancing better understanding of the information system (Kawamoto & Mathers, 2007). For instance, there are numerous reported cases that corporate culture and key metrics are not being effectively delivered to the employees in terms of accuracy and timely. In fact, this is a lack of corporate focus. However, a digital dashboard is a method through which information technology specialist can bring a broad and deep analysis, as well as measurable impact on the firm. This paper focuses on challenges that organizations face in their role of decision-making and the benefit of digital dashboards towards improved decisions.
Methodology
An action research (AR) refers to a procedure of coming up with a solution by incorporating an advanced problem-solving approach. This is aimed at dealing with the problem in hand by engaging people in progressive activities.
Stages in Action Research
Choosing the Pilot Group
The initial step of the implementation of the digital dashboard in an organization is choosing a pilot group. To choose the best group one has to account for the culture of the organization. Additionally, one has to be keen to investigate strategic, momentum, and speed relevance. This is necessitated by the fact that digital dashboards are strategically related to a different system in an organization including both business and technological. Therefore, it is fundamental to remain focused on developing the pilot but through learning from experience. By choosing a strategic statue group in organization, one can be assured that the project will not only be a success but also measurable and visible (Buijs & Wortmann, 2014). To identify a potential pilot group, it is imperative for one to do the following: Select a visible group that has the ability to generate cultural shift coupled with greater visibility, identify a group that focuses on the strategic direction of the company, and find a group where valuable information is being lost (Kaushik, 2014). Most importantly, this should include high level sponsors, such as the CEO, president, or any relevant unit leader. Additionally, stakeholders should be inculcated since they are critical in guaranteeing motivation for the implementation of digital dashboards. The stages are well presented below:
Figure 1: Stages in Action Research
Conducting the Needs Assessment
This step involves assessing the phase and balancing the act between maintaining the overall business strategy and managing end-users needs of the project. This is done through researching the available information resources to facilitate rapid development process (Hadden, n.d). The need for the assessment is focused on clarifying the information resources that will bring forth greatest impact from the digital dashboard solution.
Tapping the Information Resources
Tapping the information resources involves gathering the information needed to produce first generation dashboard projects for a company. This is because companies must be in a position to present information in an integrated and interactive manner. This implies that the existing information infrastructure may be enhanced to achieve noteworthy business value with only minimum additional cost (Buijs & Wortmann, 2014). Therefore, it is important to involve information resource owners and stakeholders to be in a position to identify information asset that is worth tapping.
Developing and Implementing the System
Developing the digital dashboards depends on the Microsoft office. In this regard, Microsoft endeavors in providing the Microsoft solution framework that supports the industry customers and partners who are looking for in-depth understanding of the process. On the other hand, the implementation of the digital dashboard depends on the amount of work that will be carried on the information resources. This underscores “finding, normalizing, and preparing information resources for inclusion in a digital dashboard (Aliy, 2011).” This is followed by refining of the digital board components and finally “user interface representation, user interface extensibility, and offline synchronization (Kaushik, 2014).”
Benefits of Digital Dashboards in Organizational Decision-making
Digital dashboard helps one to set a target for another day by choosing and knowing the kind of a problem that they need to solve. Digital dashboards, especially analytical dashboards, help one to gain an insight from a large collection of data over time. Other advantages include, saving time, money, an insight to customer behavior, aligns tactics with strategies, ensuring performance culture, as well as wide spread goal driven (Kawamoto & Mathers, 2007). Thus, it acts in supplementing the management’s or the executive’s ability to make decisions and overlook the running of the organization.
Literature Review
Companies have the urge of consolidating all their information on a single platform. A digital dashboard solves this challenge because it has tools that consolidate data and support analysis in real-time. A dashboard makes information readily available, making decision-making a simple task (Barta, 2010). Dashboards have been in existence in varying scale, and companies need to customize them to fit their usage.
In the year 1970, research on decision support systems intensified. Companies felt that pure human decisions were not sufficient and at times there were erroneous (Wolfe, 2003). Decision support systems received a boost with the introduction of internet web in the 1990s. In 1992, digital dashboards had become common in organizations. During this period, there were not many technological firms, so organizations had to design and implement the systems in-house. Data was consolidated and displayed on the platform after being gathered from all the information systems of a company.
The current form of the system has been encouraged by the old in-house systems. Companies have taken up the initiative and are developing the platforms for commercial purpose. An example of such systems is the digital cockpit for GE Aviation used to monitor the trends in aircraft spare parts transactions. Current digital dashboards have the capability to give the held information in real-time (Jamalpur & Sharma, 2012). This capability helps an organization save time. Once data is fed into the system, it must be gathered in spreadsheets for weekly or monthly elaboration so that the state of the business is monitored.
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