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Fueling these investments are dashboards, made popular by their ability to display so much information with easily recognizable icons such as speedometers, gauges and traffic lights. The word "dashboard" is often used by people who are talking about portal or scorecard technology. Many industry analysts consider it helpful to think of your dashboard as a tool that focuses on communicating performance information -- a subset of your scorecard. It offers high-level summaries of a large number of diverse metrics and variables. A dashboard is highly customized and ideally represents the most crucial data necessary to meet business objectives -- true alignment between technology and business.
"They're hot everywhere -- and in the midmarket absolutely," says John Hagerty, a vice president and research fellow at AMR Research. "People are really looking for ways to make performance data accessible to a broad audience, which means they need to make it easy to use and simple to understand. And that's really what dashboards and scorecards do; they make it easily consumable." Among companies with revenue of less than $1 billion, 15% have implemented dashboards, according to an AMR study last year. And dashboard projects were being evaluated by twice that number.
"Companies are confronted with two information problems: too much and too little," adds Wayne Eckerson, chief research officer at the Data Warehousing Institute, an association of business intelligence and data warehousing professionals based in Seattle. "Dashboards solve both those problems in ways tools haven't in the past."
But achieving a balance between necessary metrics and too much data -- and delivering results in ways that C-level executives, store managers and suppliers can use -- requires carefully defining business processes as well as a host of other issues. These range from data quality and data integration to choices about staffing and spending.
"It can be dangerous if people want a dashboard but don't want to pay a lot of money for it," says Eckerson, and then wind up just jazzing up an Excel sheet. "You may know what's going on [in the business], but not what to do about it," he says. And Gartner research director Bill Hostmann warns, "We consider it a fatal flaw to think you can put a dashboard over this jungle of information and make it deliver useful information."
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