About Business Metrics

Overview

Business Metrics are quantifiable values that measure the success and efficiency of a given business process. Different process goals call for different metrics to measure their success. Decisions 5.0 and later includes ways to define which metrics the user wants to measure for a given process and visually elegant ways to display those metrics.
For example, a user may want to measure application submissions that are started and abandoned by users. Decisions allows the ability choose the Flow Step(s) associated with that application as a relevant business metric and display it in a dashboard for analysts to see.

Business Metrics and Dashboards

Though Decisions is used as a means for completing actions, it also includes ways to visualize what's happening to take action.

There are at least three areas to think about:

1. Capturing the data that needs to measure (what is being measured?)

2. Visualizing that data (how does it need to be seen?)

3. Interpreting the data (what does it mean?)

Captured Business Metric Data can come from anywhere. It can be Process Data from a Decisions Flow, an outside system like Dropbox or Gmail, or an existing Database or Web Service call.

Visualizing data occurs within Pages and Dashboards. A common way to display key metric data through use of a Diagram Tile on a Dashboard.

Decisions allows the ability to create actionable, data-rich Dashboards with multiple Tiles displaying key metrics as shown in the example below:

Creating a Diagram Tile with a Business Metric

To create a Diagram Tile that uses Business Metric data:

1. Open or CREATE a new Page in the Page Designer.
2. Navigate to the Toolbox tab and expand the TILES category.
3. Add a Diagram Tile to the Page, the select it to navigate to its Properties tab 
   1. Click PICK DIAGRAM TILE FLOW, CREATE, provide a Name, then click CREATE.
4. Setup the Tile's Inputs on the right in the Properties tab, or by clicking SETUP INPUT DATA. 
5. Design the Diagram Tile by adding elements such as SHAPES, CHARTS, Business Metrics, and STEPS from the Toolbox tab on the left. 
6. Once the desired design has been configured, Save and close the Tile. 
7. From the Page Designer, select the Diagram Tile, then click EDIT [DIAGRAM TILE NAME] INPUT FLOW]. 

8. Configure the Flow to feed Diagram Tile Data, by mapping data to the INPUTS on the End step.

9. Save and close the Flow.

10. Save the Page, and either Preview the Page or view it outside of the Designer.
    
    

    These steps may be followed to create a high-level Diagram of a Flow itself. This allows users to quickly reference where they are in the process without having to look at the complexity of the Flow, as shown in the example below:

    
    
    

    An individual Process View page can act as a diagram that shows progress within a process. 

    In the screenshot below, the Diagram is live and will move on to subsequent steps as an action is taken. The Shapes used here are not actually Steps; rather, they represent Business Metrics - key points in the process to track.