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Why every business should have a dashboard

Every business should have a dashboard – a visual representation of the most important data showing how the business is performing

Dashboards are visual representations of your most important data points (your “key performance metrics”). They show at a glance how the various aspects of your business are performing and trending.

 

What can a dashboard achieve?

A well designed dashboard with the right metrics on it will allow a director to instantly spot opportunities or threats as they emerge, as well as answer deeper “what if” type questions, and should form the centre-piece of any management meeting.
 
The objective of a dashboard is to surface the information value of the raw data that every business generates and make it instantly understandable and digestible – monitoring the pulse of the organisation.
Correctly constructed a dashboard should be able to automatically ingest monthly, daily or near-real-time as required and serve up it’s information content to those who most need it. Indeed for many organisations a suite of dashboards is desirable – with different lenses on the data for example between the operations team, the finance team, the sales team and the executive management. This allows each to focus on the things they need to monitor and control, without excessive “noise” from items they cannot influence.

What data are you going to use?

The data to drive your dashboards should be properly structured and unified before they are produced – to ensure that all of the team are operating from a single version of the truth.

Without this, management meetings can quickly degenerate to debates about who’s version of the truth is correct and who has the better data… missing the more important point of what informational messages the data contains.

In short, even if the data isn’t 100% accurate, it’s far better to be consistently inaccurate than inconsistently inaccurate. The latter translates to operational chaos with different teams disagreeing on whether things are improving or deteriorating (and thus the correct course of action), whereas with the former, at least trends can emerge and the results of actions quantified on a common basis.

 

The solution

With a well structured cloud based data platform it is easier and cheaper than ever to develop both a stable data platform (and the right governance around it) and to operationalise dashboards for the organisation.

The first step in developing your dashboards therefore needs to be to unify your data into a platform where it has been standardised and quality-checked.

 

Find Out More

Do you want to know more about how dashboards could help your business? Get in touch and talk to us about a modern, cloud-based data and analytics solution for your business.

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