Dashboards are Not Just for Cars

Remember the first time you slid behind the steering wheel of a car, gripped the wheel, and saw the instruments on the dashboard? It was exciting to feel that you could be in control of that powerful machine. All the dials and gauges spread out before you told you how fast you were going and how well the car was functioning. You had all the information you needed to go wherever you liked, whenever you wanted.

I can’t promise that thrill each time you look at your business dashboard, but you will find it gives you the same sort of up-to-the-minute readout on how well you are doing on your business journey.

A business dashboard presents visual displays of data pulled from different business systems, and tells you at a glance how things are going. A dashboard can provide real-time intelligence that includes your key performance indicators (KPIs), and can generate ad hoc reports to support decision-making. The display might include red-yellow-green lights, graphics such as bar charts and gauges, summaries, and drill-downs, all to provide consolidated information.

A well-designed dashboard is customizable and usually role-driven, so that the dashboard displayed on the company president’s screen will be different from that of the CFO or the middle manager. The good news is that the source data for a dashboard is probably already sitting in your system right now. With a bit of planning and design work, the information living down in your digital records can be given visible form and made to work for you in new ways.

Employees benefit from having the information they need to do their job right at their fingertips, and dashboards generally allow for customization to the individual’s likes and interests. For the CFO, accounts receivable aging status can be displayed in a bar chart, but the same data could appear as a pie chart for the CEO. The Sales Manager can see the comparison of monthly goals to actual performance, and then drill down to each salesperson’s individual performance. And for the Project Manager who has customized his desktop with widgets for weather and surf conditions, it’s a simple matter to add KPI information to tell him which tasks are on, ahead, or behind schedule and which are running over budget.

In your car you have spread before you all the vital information to get from where you are to where you are going. Fuel remaining, speed, distance traveled, engine function, warning lights, perhaps even compass direction as well as time and distance to destination. On your computer screen, the digital dashboard does the same for your business.

Gentlemen, start your engines!