From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A digital dashboard, also known as an enterprise dashboard or executive dashboard, is a business management tool used to visually ascertain the status (or "health") of a business enterprise via key business indicators. Digital dashboards use visual, at-a-glance displays of data pulled from disparate business systems to provide warnings, action notices, next steps, and summaries of business conditions.

Dashboard of Sustainability screen shot illustrating example dashboard layout.

Based on the metaphor of the instrument panel in a car, the computer, or "digital" version of a dashboard provides a business manager with the input necessary to "drive" the business. Devices such as red/green/yellow lights, alerts, drill-downs, summaries, graphics such as bar charts, pie charts, bullet graphs, sparklines and gauges are usually set in a portal-like environment that is often role-driven and customizable.

Digital dashboards may be laid out to track the flows inherent in the business processes that they monitor. Graphically, users may see the high-level processes and then drill down into low level data. This level of detail is often buried deep within the corporate enterprise and otherwise unavailable to the senior executives.

Three main types of digital dashboard dominate the market today: stand alone software applications, web-browser based applications, and desktop applications also known as desktop widgets. These latter would be driven by a Widget engine.

Specialized dashboards may track all corporate functions. Examples include human resources, recruiting, sales, operations, security, information technology, project management, customer relationship management and many more departmental dashboards.

Digital dashboard projects involve business units as the driver and the information technology department as the enabler. The success of digital dashboard projects often rely on the correct selection of metrics to monitor. Key performance indicators, balanced scorecards, sales performance figures — these are just some of the content appropriate on business dashboards.

Historically, the idea of digital dashboards follows the work in the 1970s with the study of decision support systems. In the late 1990s with the surge of the web, digital dashboards as we know them today began appearing. Many systems were developed in-house by organizations to consolidate and display data already being gathered in various information systems throughout the organization. Today, digital dashboard technology is available "out-of-the-box" with many software providers on the scene. Certain companies however still continue to do in-house development and maintenance of dashboard applications. For example, GE Aviation has developed a proprietary software/portal called "Digital Cockpit" to monitor the trends in aircraft spare parts business.

Most organizations have various departments all contributing to its overall success and thus it is important to be able to assess the progress of each department. Digital dashboards, which are a type of executive information system, allow managers to do just that. To gauge exactly how well an organization is performing overall, digital dashboards allow you to capture and report specific data points from each department within the organization, thus providing a "snapshot" of performance.

Some benefits to using digital dashboards include:

• Visual presentation of performance measures
• Elimination of duplicate data entry.
• Ability to identify and correct negative trends.
• Measure efficiencies/inefficiencies.
• Ability to generate detailed reports showing new trends.
• Increase overall revenues.
• Ability to make more informed decisions based on collected BI (business intelligence)
• Align strategies and organizational goals.

• Balanced scorecard
• Business activity monitoring
• Business Intelligence
• Chart
• Complex Event Processing
• Corporate performance management
• Dashboard of Sustainability
• Data mining
• Decision support system
• Desktop widgets
• Diagram
• Enterprise manufacturing intelligence
• Event Stream Processing
• Executive Information System
• Infographic
• Information design
• Key performance indicators
• Scientific visualization
• Spreadsheet
• Visualization (graphic)

• Dashboard Insight: A collection of demos, screen shots and articles from all major dashboard companies showing current digital dashboards and discussion of current dashboard issues.
• * BusinessWeek Magazine: Giving the Boss the Big Picture: A dashboard pulls up everything the CEO needs to run the show (February 2006)
• The Dashboard Spy, a screenshot collection of over 1000 business intelligence digital dashboards including this Dashboard of the Day.
• The White House Economic Statistics Briefing Room — an example of a "dashboard" that collates information feeds from multiple sources and presents them with a unified look and feel
• A real-world example of an Excel dashboard using population data
• A discussion on dashboard design