Higher School of Economics (HSE) (IT outsourcing projects)

2023: HSE Financial Dashboard Design

What is a financial dashboard and what does a modern university need it for? The Keda Professor team spoke about what a BI system is and what tasks it solves using the example of the HSE case.

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Design and development of technical design of financial dashboard for HSE

The task is to create an interface design project and documentation for the technical design of the dashboard, which:

• consolidates the main financial and non-financial information in the form of understandable infographics;
• ensure systematic control over financial and economic activities;
• will help you make management decisions based on the available data.

Solution: A modern design project that consists of intuitive widgets and allows the user to filter data.

What is dashboard

BI systems are used in various areas to improve workflows. An understandable and readable BI platform dashboard allows you to see data in the form of a set of customizable visual components.

As a rule, the configuration of any dashboard consists of three blocks:

• menus and filters;
• navigation buttons;
• primary workspace with visualizations.

Dashboard allows you to track trends for different time periods and is customizable by the user.

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Differences between dashboard and report and infographics

It is important to understand the differences between dashboard and reports and infographics. While infographics are a simplified visualization of data, and a report is a fixation of data for a limited period, dashboard is a much more complex and mobile tool. Dashboard displays changes and allows them to be tracked. The specialist can watch how the indicators changed in different time intervals, identify trends and make forecasts.

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Types of dashboards

There are three main types of dashboards. They are usually applied in aggregate.

The operational dashboard displays data changes.

Analytical helps to investigate trends, record deviations in indicators and track their causes.

The strategic dashboard helps to create an idea of ​ ​ the situation as a whole and, if necessary, identify problems.

What data can you work with

Using dashboards, you can visualize any data. In the case of a university, this may be:

• personnel data - for example, the burden on employees, the level of wages, processing and time off, dismissal;
• student data - indicators of measures of social support, attendance, academic performance to assess the effectiveness of teaching;
• other financial and non-financial data.

Dashboard development

The development of the dashboard was carried out in several stages according to the classical methodology of the "waterfall." Briefly, the development path can be represented as a chain of sequential steps.

1 step: interviews with responsible employees. Interviews made it possible to identify basic needs and determine a specific list of relevant data that the Dashboard should have been able to monitor.

2 step: development of a set of indicators of the university's activities. At this stage, we worked with financial and non-financial indicators, determining which of them should be displayed on the dashboard using widgets.

Step 3 - Develop metrics and renderers. To make it pleasant and convenient for the user to work with the BI analytics system, you need to develop an intuitive and beautiful graphic environment in the style of the HSE brand book.

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Step 4: Structure Study. At this step, you need to customize the intuitive location of the data and adapt the interface for viewing and control from a mobile device.

Step 5: Setting up the dashboard.

Results

The well-coordinated and effective work of the team resulted in a modern, convenient and intuitive product in management, which gives access to financial and non-financial information on the area of ​ ​ interest in the university and helps to solve a number of tasks at the Higher School of Economics. For example, the dashboard allows:

• monitor the main financial indicators collected in a single interface;
• monitor compliance with the limits of the financial plan for a specific limit holder;
• receive information on the economic condition of each of the departments and campuses of the university;
• Display master financial data such as income and expense structure, cash flow, financial plan execution forecast
• view basic information about social support measures for students;
• monitor the salary level of university employees and compare it with the level in other universities.

Widgets that display information of interest can always be added to Favorites, and irrelevant ones can be deleted.

Every year BI systems in Russia are finding more and more use. To solve the problems of training organizations, they can also be very useful.