It’s all about making business information easier to understand by presenting it in the “most” clear graphic format, rather than just tables of numbers.

Dashboards can be created to significantly improve the usefulness of business information. Most businesses have numerous regular reports with lots of summarized data, but not necessarily much analysis of that data. Key information can be pulled from several different reports into a dashboard view, highlighting the areas of excellent performance and those that require urgent attention. The business leader can focus only on those areas (kudos for the excellent performance and follow up on the urgent attention points) and know that they don’t need to worry about the areas that are not highlighted. The multiple reports can still be available for deeper dives but they don’t need to be reviewed in detail if those areas are doing fine.

Dashboards can be done at different levels. A higher level weekly, monthly or quarterly view could be shown to the top level management showing the longer term performance. A daily or weekly view could be shown at the mid level showing a finer level of detail and indicating where they need to focus from day to day. Depending on the kind of operation, a “live” version could track performance for different part of an operation each day. Ideally the different levels would all be aligned so the front line people are working towards the same outcomes as the top level management are.