{"id":12153,"date":"2010-09-27T23:07:30","date_gmt":"2010-09-27T22:07:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=2186"},"modified":"2021-08-17T08:53:05","modified_gmt":"2021-08-17T06:53:05","slug":"business-intelligence-in-lisbon-it-operations-dashboards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/business-intelligence-in-lisbon-it-operations-dashboards.html","title":{"rendered":"Business Intelligence in Lisbon: IT Operations Dashboards"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lisbon<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a>SAP Portugal<\/a> put on a great business intelligence event last week<\/a> at the Oriental Museum<\/a> in Lisbon (just up the road from the Bel\u00e9m Tower<\/a> shown in my photo above). The sold-out event featured a series of great presentations from customers and partners \u2013 and a long (long!) networking lunch.<\/p>\n

I was nursing a cold from the previous presentation in Zurich<\/a>, but managed to get through the keynote presentation and journalist interviews before my voice degenerated into a strangled squeak.<\/p>\n

Sadly, my Portuguese language skills are more or less non-existent (\u201cbom dia! obrigado!\u201d), so I wasn\u2019t able to follow most of the presentations, but one of them, with slides in English, really grabbed my attention.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve long been an advocate of IT organizations using business intelligence to optimize their own operations \u2013 because it\u2019s a good idea (who could argue that IT isn\u2019t an essential business function, or that it doesn\u2019t need improving?), but also in order to provide a showcase to other organizations on how to use information effectively.<\/p>\n

Ricardo Guerra<\/a> of Volkswagen AutoEuropa<\/a> gave a wonderful example of this. He explained how his organization uses a series of Xcelsius dashboards (soon to be renamed \u201cSAP BusinessObjects Dashboards\u201d) to track every aspect of their IT operations, gathered across many different systems.<\/p>\n

The beautifully-crafted dashboards (created by SAP partner Novabase<\/a>) are displayed on monitors at key locations throughout the organization. The goals of the project were to give an overview of the health of the IT systems, highlight and anticipate problems, facilitate communication and service quality, and manage IT contracts.<\/p>\n

\"autoeuropa\"<\/p>\n

Each team (IT coordination, helpdesk, infrastructure, network, etc.) has a customized dashboard adapted to their key metrics, and an overall dashboard gives a side-by-side comparison of the performance of different teams.<\/p>\n

\"image\" \"image\"<\/p>\n

\"image\" \"image\"<\/p>\n

The benefits quoted by Ricardo are very impressive:<\/p>\n