Dashboard Utility

DASHBOARDS AND STRATEGY

Once an organization has developed strategies and tactics, it can use strategy maps and scorecards that help managers visualize and track their goals and tactics. Modern dashboards (often as part of deployments in portals) can then display or integrate with these tools. Well - planned and well - designed dashboards can effectively display key performance - related charts and indicators together with strategy maps and scorecards to help an organization focus their employees on the most important performance - related activities and drivers.

DASHBOARDS AND PLANNING

What do dashboards have to do with planning? The main role of a dashboard is to provide a means for managers to monitor, analyze, and sometimes annotate (e.g., explaining variances in an embedded scorecard), and there are several strong ties to planning and budgeting:

Displaying, analyzing, and comparing historical figures with budgets, forecasts and targets
Focused dashboards for deep analysis of budgets and forecasts (For example, this can be particularly effective when dashboards are fully integrated with planning tools, and organizations utilize a continuous planning methodology. Managers can then analyze trends and variances in a dashboard, almost immediately revise a forecast, and then see it updated back in the dashboard in near real time.)
Monitoring and sharing of strategies across business units
Monitoring of resource allocation figures whereby business units can propose investments of discretionary funds in various programs and projects.
DASHBOARDS AND REPORTING

Although it is not typical to use major portions of a dashboard to display detailed reports (then it would be more like a “report-board”), it can be highly effective to embed links to reports within a dashboard. This provides managers with detailed views of information that can support analysis done in embedded scorecards and charts. These reports also offer a professional format for printing or...