Free «Business Intelligence» Essay

Audience

The end users of the dashboard will comprise the administration, departmental heads, workers, and shareholders. The main branches of Westpac include Business Bank, Consumer Bank, BTFG, Westpac New Zealand, and WIB (Westpac Banking Corporation 2017). Talking about other departments, the business incorporates customer and business service, group technology, treasury, and core support.

The management is responsible for establishing policies that guide individual departments. The primary departments are accountable for sales and marketing, funds management, and provision of financial services to diverse clients. The customer and business services division is tasked with banking operations, compliance, and customer service. On the other hand, the main tasks of group technology department are the adoption of technology infrastructure, architecture, and apps development (Westpac Banking Corporation 2017). Finally, the treasury division is in charge of the management of the company’s accounts and finances.

The dashboard will allow the seniors to monitor the performance of individual departments. Consequently, the management will identify low-performing departments that may inhibit the growth of the company. In such circumstances, the company's authorities will take corrective measures. Therefore, the end users will benefit from making correct business decisions that will increase efficiency and maximize sales. Furthermore, the management has to introduce an operating scheme that will align all divisions with the organization's mission and vision. The dashboard will ensure that the administration can efficiently achieve this task. Employees will benefit from increased efficiency and reduced time for completing their duties (Loshin 2013, p. 58). It will be possible to achieve such benefits because the dashboards facilitate work by enabling the employees to automate repetitive tasks. Therefore, the staff is no longer required to spend a considerable amount of time to perform various tasks. Finally, the shareholders will achieve numerous advantages from an increased return on investment due to lower operational costs coupled with increased sales.

Benefits

The dashboard will provide total visibility in the business by giving the company an opportunity to predict the impact of every action taken. Westpac Banking Corporation will be aimed at employing the most suitable marketing strategies to reach its target market. For instance, if the company sends emails to prospective clients, the dashboard will allow the enterprise to learn how many customers responded to the emails and the way sales were impacted by that decision (Laursen & Thorlund 2016, p. 72). As a result, the corporation will establish which marketing strategies produce the best results.

Moreover, the dashboard will save much time, which will allow the company to focus on repetitive tasks. For example, Westpac Banking Corporation is currently reliant on the employees to produce excel reports of various financial tasks on a regular basis. Currently, every time the management needs a report, the employees have to put efforts to create it. Nonetheless, the dashboard will make it possible for the employees to create the report only once and set a feature of automatic update. In other words, the report will update whenever the financial condition changes (Sharda, Delen & Turban 2014, p. 97). As a result, this will create efficiency that will make the organization smoothly operate.

The key performance indicators of Westpac Banking Corporation include an increased number of customers, superior portfolio, and high capital. The dashboard benefits will be linked to all the above KPIs (Loshin 2013, p. 40). First, it will allow the company to learn the exact number of new customers that the organization obtains. The reason is that the dashboard captures a snap of the performance of the entire organization in a single platform. Thus, the business will be able to establish how many new clients it has acquired at any given time. In addition, the dashboard will permit the organization to discover such aspects of customer service as the time taken by the company employees to answer calls from clients and the services with the lowest customer satisfaction (Turban, Sharda & Delen 2011, p. 45). Subsequently, Westpac will introduce remedial measures. For instance, if the dashboard indicates that the time taken to answer customer calls is long, the management may opt to increase customer service personnel and devise new ways for customers to voice their concerns. Evidently, when the clients are empowered to solve their issues without the need to contact the organization, there will be fewer calls made to Westpac Banking Corporation. In such a way, this action will help the organization realize KPI of a quality portfolio.

The opportunities of dashboards include user training and an opportunity to simplify the process of attaching supporting documents. Greater achievements will be attained when users know how to effectively operate the dashboards. Accordingly, they will make maximum use of facilities and draw correct conclusions that will enable the management to make better decisions.

The primary threat relating to dashboards is that the choice of metrics has not been adequately addressed. As a result, the company may not be able to quickly identify the key performance indicators without creating additional reports (Loshin 2013, p. 100). Furthermore, multiple logging is sometimes mandated by the users, significantly hindering the process.

Data

Internal and external data will be incorporated in the dashboard. In regards to internal data, it encompasses data that is produced within the departments such as sales, HR, and marketing data. This data is important, as it helps the organization to boost efficiency of internal operations that will, in turn, increase the revenue obtained (Laursen & Thorlund 2016, p. 40). For instance, data on human resources such as personal records of the staff will provide information on the employee’s capabilities and weaknesses. Consequently, the management will undertake training initiatives that will equip the staff with appropriate skills needed to efficiently perform their daily tasks. Data from the finance department will aid the company in optimizing profits. Furthermore, this data will assist the organization to learn the exact amount of disposable income it receives that can be used for conducting extensive marketing plans.

On the other hand, external data is important, as it will help the business learn new trends in the market and offers given by rival firms, changing customer preferences. This data is important since it helps the corporation to attain a competitive edge (Sharda, Delen & Turban 2014, p. 77). For instance, the company may obtain secondary sources of information such as journals and newspapers that provide information on how businesses in the industry can enhance their performance. Additionally, this method will enable Westpac Banking Corporation to learn about offers that the rival companies are giving customers. Consequently, the company will provide counteroffers that will ensure it retains its existing clients and attracts new ones.

Finally, motivation data will be included in the dashboard. The rationale for the employment of this data is that it will encourage employees to improve their productivity. Consequently, the organization will benefit from increased revenue. The way motivated employees serve the customers will improve, thereby increasing customer satisfaction at Westpac Banking Corporation.

Challenges

There are various challenges Westpac Banking Corporation can encountered in implementing a dashboard. The first challenge is data quality. The reason is that dashboards operate on the garbage in garbage output (GIGO). Thus, this implies that when the correct data is input, the output will be accurate. Nonetheless, when wrong data is input to the dashboard, the subsequent auto-generated reports will also be wrong (Loshin 2013, p. 40). Consequently, the management can make wrong business decisions due to low quality of data that was input.

Second, data availability in the dashboard is contingent on several factors. For instance, many requests sent to the database containing different data may cause it to be unavailable. This situation is determined as denial of service, and it leads to the users being denied access to the dashboard. Similarly, the dashboard may be unable to perform all its functions such as auto-generating reports. Data availability is also associated with a situation when the dashboard can be restored quickly in the event of a malfunction (Turban, Sharda & Delen 2011, p. 55). However, the technology employed and the skills of the system administrators are the primary factors that determine recoverability. Therefore, when the system malfunctions, it may take a considerable amount of time to restore the dashboard.

The choice of data poses another challenge. The reason is that the management is not solely responsible for selecting the data that will be included in the dashboard. Instead, the seniors delegate this function to the employees. Thus, any member of the staff can attach relevant data to the dashboard that will be used in the analysis process. However, the employees may input wrong data that will negatively affect the performance of the dashboard.

End user satisfaction is dependent on several aspects, including response time, availability, and ease of use. For example, the employees and the management will be satisfied when the dashboard has a short response time (Laursen & Thorlund 2016, p. 22). Apparently, this implies that any report they want can be updated in real-time and instantaneously. What is more, the two end users will be satisfied when they have the opportunity to access the dashboard at any time of day or night. On the other hand, the shareholders will obtain the added advantage from the efficiency created by the dashboard, as it will increase their rate of returns.

The dashboard will employ modest data visualization tools such as bar graphs, pie charts, and frequency tables that can easily be understood by all employees. Since the dashboards provide a platform where all users in different departments can access data, it is important for the data visualization tools to be modest (Turban, Sharda & Delen 2011, p. 45). As a result, this will enable an employee in one department that requires data from a different department to understand the information displayed on the dashboard and use it correctly to perform their tasks.

Methodology

The BI life cycle is composed of such stages as analyzing business needs, designing logical model, designing physical data model, creating a data warehouse, building project metadata, developing requirements, and finally administering and sustaining.

The above-mentioned steps will include analyzing the business needs of the company. The requirements will provide a scope of the dashboard. The second step is designing the logical model which entails creating entities and relationships within the database. The third phase is building the physical model that involves setting foreign keys in the database. Fifth, the data warehouse is constructed when the data will be stored and extracted whenever needed. The sixth step is creating the metadata that will provide details relating to the information contained in the data warehouse. The seventh step will be the automation of reports that will give the possibility to automatically update the reports (Loshin 2013, p. 18). The final step is administering and maintaining the dashboard by adding relevant data.

The dashboard will be deployed in pilot phases. The dashboard will be implemented in different divisions of the corporation. This approach of deployment will make the company able to identify any challenges and correct them before other departments adopt the dashboard (Turban, Sharda & Delen 2011, p. 45). Accordingly, the dashboard will have a higher likelihood of success.

The development team will comprise IT staff and members from all individual customer segments. Time factor will be the most important element, as it will affect the overall cost and success of the dashboard. Finally, the design phase will capture all requirements to ensure that the database is fully functional.