What is a Business Dashboard?

A business dashboard is a powerful way to combine multiple views into a single display. So at a glance you can see the important information needed to support your objectives and to keep control.

The unexpected always happens. Things vary and change both inside and outside the company so it is important to keep tracking the important measures that your organisation uses to ensure your continued success.

Please wait... for a real dynamic example of a dashboard to appear. There are three tabs anong the top - look at all three, Try filtering using the filters on the left or below.

Notice how the tabular report in the third tab it is difficult to see - information visualization or visualisation makes a big difference to seeing what is going on.

Click Here to find out about Tableau Software that made the dashboard below

Finally see below how you can view a comprehensive FREE 30 minute video on constructing Dashboards

Example Dashboard

Business Dashboards can be classified into three types:

Strategic – has minimal interaction. You can see the summary at a glance. Primarily for senior managers reviewing the big picture of the organisation e.g. budgets, actuals, and forecasts, often long terms of time (years, quarters, months). Drilling down into details is not required here.

Example of a Strategic Dashboard

Analytical – for analysis, comparing situations and exploring. This type of dashboard helps make decisions to follow say the current strategic plan. It should allow you to look for trends and outliers that present new opportunities or threats to the continued organisation success or the achievement of objectives. Comparisons, drilling down into details, and tracking changes in shorter terms of time (months, weeks, days).

Example of Simple Analytical Dashboard

Operational – are for monitoring tasks that might need action soon or right now at the minute, hour and daily level Operational dashboards are for monitoring tasks that might need action soon or right now; your interest is in intra-day periods (hours, minutes). This similar to Analytical but on far shorter timescale.

Click here to find Tips on Dashboard Design

There many software packages around that can transform your Excel Spreadsheets, Access Databases and other major database data into a dashboard. Click on the link below to find out about how to readily create a dashboard from Excel.

'How to Rapidly build a dashboard from an Excel Spreadsheet'

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