VIENNA, Va. -
"There's such a pent-up demand for the dashboards now that employees have seen them," said John Charles Herzberg, manager of e-commerce for the world's largest credit union.
In just three months, the $27-billion credit union has gone from proof of concept to launching iDashboards in the lending department and the new-account-opening pipeline, among other business areas, Herzberg said.
"We thought, 'this doesn't get any easier,'" he rlated.
The dashboard software, provided by Troy, Mich.-based iDashboards, allows employees to view and manage business and personal metrics across the enterprise, all from the comfort of one desktop screen.
Charts, Graphs, Dials And Maps
A color-coded, illustrated home screen with charts, graphs, dials, maps and Flash technology delivers the "sex appeal we were looking for" and gives Navy Federal Credit Union employees a "30,000-foot view of KPIs to help them make good decisions," Herzberg explained.
Hover the computer mouse over any one graphic, and additional details pop up. "Each portlet is designed to be drillable so that you can dive deeper," said Herzberg.
For example, the call center can see an overview of the day's call volume and then drill-down to call volume between noon and 1 p.m. simply by holding the mouse over a bar chart.
For the brass tacks, the call center can click down to the origin of the call volume during that time.
If performance indicators fall below set levels, employees are notified with red alerts. "The focus of the dashboards is to explain the KPIs," Herzberg said. "What is creating that red alert?"
iDashboards may wipe out the prevalent complaint of 'too much data, too little time,' voiced by many credit union managers, Herzberg continued.
"There's so much data out there and so many reports that any one employee has to look at," he said. "But we can take all of those reports and dump them into one dashboard. What took hours to digest numbers now takes minutes."
Better yet, iDashboards amalgamates seemingly limitless types of data from each system and department, said Herzberg.
"We can see call volume based upon staffing trends," he explained. "Then, we can overlay that data with the peaks and valleys of our military pay days. Then we can take that trend data and overlay it with online account log-ins. We can apply all of the different lines of business on top of each other, whereas before they all existed as separate silos of data.
"Now we can see where we want to put our money," he said.
A Key Feature
The technical team at the nation's largest credit union was particularly impressed with the platform independence that iDashboard demonstrates, Herzberg added.
"We have it running on Windows, Linux-even a 1 megabyte web server," he observed.
Navy Federal Credit Union's goal this year is to create 100 customized dashboards that will serve a variety of departments.
"Our model is 'measure twice, cut once,'" said Herzberg. "We work with each business unit to choose the type of graphic. The business unit draws up a concept on a piece of paper and we build the dashboard. It's amazing how quickly you can get these out."
FOR MORE RESOURCES
Read more about dashboard technologies and business intelligence at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
Go (con)Figure, for a story on Ent FCU's network configuration dashboard.
How To Use Business Intelligence More Intelligently, for a story on how business intelligence can be used to increase product penetration
Units of Power Analysis, for a story about BECU's analytical processing engine.
For More Info On This Story:
* Navy FCU, www.ccculv.org
* iDashboards, www.idashboards.com
