The Importance of Dashboards in Business
What is a Dashboard?
A dashboard is an information management tool used to track KPIs, metrics, and key data points that are relevant to your business, department, or a specific process. Dashboards aggregate and visualize data from multiple sources, such as databases, locally hosted files, and web services. Dashboards allow you to monitor your business performance by displaying historical trends, actionable data, and real-time information.
Dashboards actually take their name from automobile dashboards and they are used in much the same way. For the sake of an analogy, let’s look at a car. There may be hundreds of processes that impact the performance of your vehicle if you look under the hood. Your car’s dashboard summarizes this using visualizations so you can focus on what matters most: safely driving your vehicle.
For businesses, there are hundreds of processes that impact your performance if you look ‘under the hood’, so to speak. And with a wealth of data made available these days, managing and extracting value from it can be difficult. Simplifying data analysis and distribution through tools like dashboards is a way to help businesses rev their engines and make smarter, better, faster data-driven decisions.
And a well designed dashboard levels up your approach to information management. Everyone in the business, regardless of role, has questions about your company performance, whether it be campaign performance, new wins, or churn rate. Dashboards bring everyone (and your metrics) together in one place to answer these questions.