New Performance Dashboard on AWS makes delivering open, responsive government simple

Data is at the heart of showing citizens how public services are working, and it enables the public sector to improve policy and operational delivery. Citizens expect accessible and useful services. The public sector aims to demonstrate success through data. To build trust in this relationship and promote accountability, public sector organizations need to communicate the data-driven performance of the services they provide.

It’s difficult to manage and showcase data well, even in digital form, and many of our customers spend significant time on setting up mechanisms to accomplish this. To help address these challenges, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is releasing Performance Dashboard on AWS. Performance Dashboard on AWS is a new open source solution to help you measure and share what’s important in one place and at minimal cost, and you can have the solution up and running in a matter of minutes.

Communicate context with your data

Performance metrics should be communicated in a way that is accessible to everybody, equally. By the very nature of their work, public service organizations reach diverse audiences — government is for everyone and citizens have a range of abilities when it comes to understanding information on data and technology. Creating clean, easy to read data visualizations in a simple format can make it easier for audiences to understand the information being shared. Your dashboards should be inviting and informative.

Performance Dashboard on AWS is designed to provide you with core, complementary building blocks to share your information in a customizable way. Dashboard charts are accompanied by narrative elements for you to incorporate critical context alongside the data visualizations. Information’s utility is only increased with the combination of analytical text and clear data visualizations. Delfina Irazusta, executive director of Argentina-based Red de Innovación Local, shares her perspective, “We will be using Performance Dashboard on AWS to present results and tell stories to our stakeholders. I don’t have any tool to do this with. We have a website, but no section to tell a story with data. I think that makes the solution really interesting, and I’m going to use it with all the stakeholders we have.” With the available components, you can develop the type of dashboard that achieves your communication goal. You can create a dashboard filled strictly with an assortment of data visualizations, or strike a balance between longer form narrative text and visual elements—whatever you need.

Centralize your performance data

Critical data supports more effective decision-making and has more impact with users when it is in one place. Performance Dashboard on AWS offers multiple paths to centralize your information. Data sources may be directly integrated using a standard API for automatic, recurring collections or uploaded manually through the Performance Dashboard on AWS user interface. Your teams can now easily start sharing the critical information that they have on file.

You can offer your stakeholders a one-stop shop for all the major performance measurements of your initiatives and services. Performance Dashboard on AWS can automatically present your performance dashboards in mobile or desktop versions by leveraging an open source web design system developed specifically for the public sector. Your audience can now stay in the know from anywhere, on any device.

Keep your costs and overhead at a minimum

For small and large government organizations alike, investing in a development team to build your own performance dashboard website or procuring the necessary licenses to share your performance visualizations can be prohibitively expensive. Performance Dashboard on AWS makes it possible for public sector organizations of all sizes to have their own customizable solution. Its serverless design means your dashboard can also automatically scale to meet your user needs, and you can eliminate the overhead costs of servers.

There are no licensing fees with Performance Dashboard on AWS. You simply pay-as-you-go for the underlying services on AWS. The solution helps you share your mission’s impact without breaking the bank or entering long-term commitments.

Get up and running in minutes

Performance Dashboard on AWS makes your setup simple with the use of AWS CloudFormation templates. Customers who participated in the solution’s beta program typically completed installations in less than an hour.

Figure 1 shows the services that are set up with the CloudFormation template installation.

Figure 1: Services that are set up with the AWS CloudFormation template installation.

Get started sharing what matters

Learn more about Performance Dashboard on AWS on the webpage where there is an implementation guide and a link to start the installation process in your own AWS account.