Do Your Board Meetings Use PowerPoint or Real-time Analytics Dashboards?

This week I had a chance to attend the SAP TechEd event in Las Vegas. I met with a number of healthcare people at the event and so I’ll be covering the SAP Hana platform and their new Cloud Analytics offerings in future posts. Turns out that SAP has a pretty compelling story for those of us in healthcare. More on that later.

During the SAP TechEd keynote, they did a demo of an SAP board meeting and during the board meeting they didn’t use any powerpoint charts, but instead dove directly into the SAP business dashboards. Such a simple concept, but a really good one.

How often have you been in a meeting and the data their showing is out dated? I know it’s happened to me. It’s a problem for me as a blogger as well. Whenever I build something for my potential advertisers, the document is immediately in need of updating. I’ve actually started exploring a real time view into the analytics to solve that problem for my advertisers. That’s essentially what a real time dashboard is like for a healthcare organization.

Certainly there are times when you might want to consider specific point in time images, but most of the time it’s much more powerful to have the real time data of what’s happening in your organization.

The other reason a BI dashboard is so much better than a static image on a powerpoint is that if and when you have questions about the data you can literally drill down into the data and get the answers to your questions. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been in a meeting where someone has asked a question about a chart and the response is “I’ll have to look into it.” Real-time analytics dashboards mean that you can look into it right then, get the answer and move the agenda forward.

How do you handle this in your organization? Do you pull up the real time stats at your board meetings and other management meetings? Or do you still go through a bunch of powerpoint slides with charts and graphs of what people want to show you?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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