These days with a just few keystrokes, executives can pull up all types of real-time business performance data onto their computer screens. That’s thanks primarily to dashboard displays – vital business intelligence tools intended to show managers the direction their organizations are headed.

A significant operational tool for both small and large companies, a dashboard helps ensure that an organization is performing according to its objectives. Like an instrument panel in a car or cockpit, dashboards give companies a visual status of their key performance indicators at a glance. Information is accessed in real time, letting a decision-maker see changes in the business almost as they occur. Some dashboards also offer simulators that allow executives to test out the impact of their impending decisions or proposed changes.

Armed with all this important information, and presented in highly stylized graphics, managers are supposed to be better able to make critical operational corrections or decisions quickly. 

Trouble in dashboard paradise

So what’s the problem? For starters, companies become so enamored of the technology, they neglect to dedicate sufficient time identifying the right metrics to track in the first place.

Before deciding on which technology to choose, organizations must first decide how it will be used and understand the ways in which they can best benefit from dashboard information. They must define the factors that matter most to their strategy for achieving success and the critical drivers that influence performance.

Some companies decide that practically everything must be measured, creating information overload. When too much information is designed into a dashboard, it can end up a cluttered mess, and irrelevant metrics can obscure the truly important data.

Here are some additional concerns organizations should be prepared to address when pursuing dashboard technology.

• Questionable data quality. A dashboard is only as good as the data that goes into it. Often this requires scrubbing existing data before integrating it, and ensuring that outdated information doesn’t get in the way of real-time data needs. Otherwise, if the numbers aren’t accurate, the decisions made based on those numbers won’t be right either.
  
  
• Possible morale buster. A dashboard puts performance under the microscope then displays it publicly. Such rigorous monitoring can put people ill at ease, adding pressure on a workforce. Companies may need to implement first-round initiatives without highlighting individual performance, adding such features once the organization is accustomed to the overall dashboard benefits.
  
  
• Debatable interpretations. Managers can misinterpret dashboard numbers or deduce correlations between two sets of numbers that may not be valid. Unfortunately, decisions are then generated based on false understandings. Managers must not only learn to apply dashboard data, they must maintain an active understanding of how operations are integrated and how various activities affect each other.