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Definition
Originally a board used
to stop mud from being dashed inside a vehicle, the word dashboard has evolved
to mean a user interface that organizes and presents information in a way that
is easy to read. Your Blogger Dashboard is your control panel, your main editing
interface to Blogger. The goal of the dashboard
is to automatically show a user useful files and other objects as he goes about
his day. While you read email, browse the web, write a document, or talk to your
friends on IM, the dashboard does its best to proactively find objects that are
relevant to your current activity, and to display them in a friendly way, saving
you from digging around through your stuff like a disorganized filing clerk. Dashboard
basics Dashboards have emerged as the fashionable
term for easy-to-digest, customised views of BI software applications that aggregate
and analyse data from disparate corporate sources. Yet a standard definition has
yet to gel among the user community and vendors. Michael Smith, senior product
marketing manager for Cognos, sees the dashboard as "a compound visual report
that elevates the nitty-gritty of business reporting to a graphical level." Chris
Caren, VP of corporate marketing at Business Objects, argues that dashboards represent
a new paradigm for getting data out of BI systems that radically differs from
traditional BI reporting. "Dashboards are a strong indication that BI is
now evolving towards a metrics-driven style of management," he says. Meanwhile,
Eugene Blaine, managing director of Atlantic Global, sees dashboards as a relationship
enabler: "If a dashboard is deployed and used properly it's a powerful way
to demonstrate that users are listening to the organisation and influencing it." John
Kopcke, chief technology officer at Hyperion Solutions, believes that dashboards
will eventually replace traditional query and reporting tools as an entry-level
interface for BI information consumption. "IT got it all wrong when they
looked at what was needed for the first-level of information delivery," he
says. "What users should get is a dashboard as opposed to a mountain of reports." Dashboards
are all about measurements. The centrepiece of any dashboard design is its metrics
and KPIs and how they are captured and combined visually in graphs to reflect
the health of the business.
Key Performance
Indicators, also known as KPI or Key Success Indicators (KSI), help an organization
define and measure progress toward organizational goals.
Once an organization
has analyzed its mission, identified all its stakeholders, and defined its goals,
it needs a way to measure progress toward those goals. Key Performance Indicators
are those measurements
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