Visual Dashboards and Your Organization’s Data

With millions of events to track, most modern executives don’t need more data. They need ways to cope with, streamline, and simplify the data they already have.

Thus the recent boom in visual dashboards, and the droves of executives adopting them.

In some industries, these dashboards threaten to unseat accounting as the intermediary between data and deciders. A modern executive can view, sift, and act on the latest report of his organization’s health–all in his dashboard, all without waiting for period-close.

But not all dashboards are created equal.

Some dashboards come in a larger system with built-in data gathering. Many, however, are sold as distinct modules that clients themselves have to fine-tune and integrate.

The wrong dashboard can actually weaken decision-making. HBR’s Joel Shapiro identifies three ‘traps’ that executives can fall into: relying on irrelevant information, excluding context, and misattributing causality. In each of Shapiro’s scenarios, the simplicity and convenience of a dashboard can blight, rather than bless, corporate strategy.

So what makes for a reliable dashboard?

• Dashboard and data collection modules should both be part of a larger system.
• Software should allow each client-company to fully configure their display, and each user within that company to adapt it for his or her decision-making needs.
• Dashboards should display the organization’s defined goals, not generic KPIs.
• They should empower executives to see data in a variety of visual formats.
• They should facilitate presentations as well as deep, drill-down analysis.
• They should provide trustworthy, relevant information both when and where decision-makers need it.