Guided by Dashboards

You probably wouldn’t even think about taking your car out on the freeway without a working dashboard. Without knowing how fast you were going, how much fuel you had, or whether the car was overheating, you’d be putting yourself, your passengers, and other drivers at significant risk.

Today’s technology consultants think the same can be said of running a successful company—take it out without a dashboard, and you might have trouble reaching the destination you seek, or at least doing so without considerable trouble along the way.

The best dashboards are tied directly into data stores or data warehouses that are comprehensive, accurate, and continually updated.

The “dashboards” these consultants refer to are not attached to automobiles, but rather to corporate data systems and information networks. Also referred to as visual intelligence, business intelligence, performance management, or even the grandiloquently polysyllabic enterprise data visualization application—a performance dashboard in a business sense describes a computer screen that displays a collection of gauges, measurements, and data. It gives an executive a current and accurate at-a-glance view of how his or her business is performing, using any of a number of key corporate metrics.

A dashboard might, for instance, show daily, weekly, or monthly sales figures, sorted and displayed by region, customer, or salesperson. It could present this data on a speedometer- or odometer-type graph that shows sales-to-date as a percentage of total sales goals for the period. Another set of graphs or gauges might show financial statistics such as the business development portion of operating expenses, the number of days remaining to pay invoices, profit per hour, and net inventory in dollars. Another chart or graph could track strategic initiatives, estimating completion dates. A bar chart might show inventory levels, particularly if the tracking of inventory is a leading indicator of business health for the company. A dashboard, in other words, presents critical data an executive needs to get an up-to-the minute picture of overall business health.

Time For a Tune-Up?

The best performance dashboards, in fact, look pretty much like the dashboard you might have in your car. Popular graphics on a performance dashboard include gauges with sliders (picture a fuel gauge, showing both “full” and “empty” and a needle that shows the amount “left in the tank” or left to go), thermometers or barometers with sliders (as sales grow and accumulate, the “temperature” rises), and any type of graph, chart, tickers, or maps. As with a vehicle dashboard, the goal is to give the driver—in this case an executive—a chance to see what is happening without taking their eyes off the road (in the business sense, digging through voluminous reports).

“You want to get a quick over-view of the status or health of your business and get some idea of what needs to be addressed,” says Dave Vernon, a partner at JDB Associates, an IT consulting firm in Maple Grove. “The dashboard should contain factors that are key to the business. If these factors get better, the business gets better.”