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obr11544_ch10_359-411 8/25/06 01:56 PM Page 361

REAL WORLD

CASE

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Oracle Corporation and Others:

Dashboards for Executives and

Business Professionals: The Power

and the Challenge

racle CEO Lawrence J. Ellison was on his honeymoon. The billionaire and his bride, romance

novelist Melanie Craft, were relaxing on his 243foot Katana yacht off St. Barts, the Caribbean island known

as a haven for movie moguls and rock stars. But Ellison, for

the umpteenth time, couldn’t help himself. He climbed to his

office on the upper deck of the Katana, fired up his computer,

and logged on to the Web site of a small company called

NetSuite. It was the last day of the fiscal year, and Ellison, the

cofounder of NetSuite and its largest investor, needed to

know if the start-up was going to meet its numbers.

Before the Internet, Ellison says, taking the pulse of a

company was sort of ridiculous to get the latest sales information. He would call several people and wait days for them

to process financial reports that often were out of date by the

time he got them. “You would use your cell phone and work

on feelings,” he says.

But thanks to a new Web-based management tool

known as a “dashboard,” Ellison had the information he

needed in seconds. Like the instrument panel in a car, the

computer version displays critical info in easy-to-read graphics, assembled from data pulled in real time from corporate

software and databases. Logging on to his dashboard for

NetSuite, Ellison reviewed the financial data and saw surprisingly strong sales. He quickly called NetSuite CEO

Zachary A. Nelson. Recalls Nelson: “The first thing he

screams is: ‘Are the numbers on my dashboard right?’” Nelson

looked at his own dashboard, but his sales data were lower.

FIGURE 10.1

Dashboards provide key business information to

executives, small business managers, and many

business professionals.

Source: Courtesy of Corda.com.

So he pushed a refresh button. “The information came up

with the new orders, and it...