Executives use dashboards to know different performance indicators all at once. It epitomizes the information in many different ways such as they can contain bar charts, graphs, pictures and tables. It is generally created with Microsoft Excel, Cognos 8 Business Intelligence or some other kinds of business software. It’s easy to overload dashboards with too much information, though, so create dashboards with their intended audience in mind. You can also make multiple dashboards for better readability.
Balanced Scorecard Dashboard
This executive dashboard measures performance in four areas: research, customer satisfaction, internal controls and finances. They used this dashboard to easily check how well the company is performing in these areas. Based on the study “”Survey of Accounting” by Carl Warren some of the information on a scoreboard includes sales revenue, profit, research costs and new product sales. The scorecard idea was coined at the Harvard Business School by two professors. The balanced scorecard is famous with executives who want to see a more complete view of the business financial performance.
Portfolio Dashboard
Portfolio dashboards analyze the status of various projects. The dashboard feature the price of each project, returns on investments and project types. They are used in businesses that have many projects occurring at the same time. Project managers use the dashboards to make decisions about projects. The portfolio dashboards are well-known in investments companies, hedge funds and private equity firms because they have to regularly track various tasks.
Service Dashboard
The service dashboard measures customer service and technological problems within the IT department. Some of the metrics compromise the number of computer bugs and number or emails received during a specific time period. This information is used to enhance response times, employee training and other performance concerns.
Sales Performance Dashboard
This executive dashboard show information related to sales. The common information includes recent sales, past sales and percent change in sales. The sales performance dashboards freely sum this information for sales executives who want to change their management techniques.
Linkage Dashboard
These dashboards link multiple measurements in various departments or companies. For an instance, an advertising business could link a TV commercial budget in the production department with national TV ratings to show how they relate to each other. These good BI software dashboards help executives who don’t usually work together see effects that they differently wouldn’t obviously see. Linkage dashboards enhance interdepartmental communication and can create common goals between different departments.
Nature of Executive Dashboards
