Do you use dashboards to run your business? Dashboards are a major improvement over traditional reports. Instead of presenting rows and columns of incomprehensible data, dashboards provide a simple view of key indicators and their status. What could be better?
While there is a lot of hype around dashboards, they aren’t that new. Business dashboards have been around for decades. What is new is the way that current technology has made dashboards more effective. Today’s dashboards can provide real-time data down to the individual transaction. That’s a game changer. Dashboards also have a lot more data supporting them allowing leaders to dig deeper and more specifically to answer their questions.
Despite the advances made in the technology underlying dashboards, one thing hasn’t changed much – their layout. Many are still modelled after their analog predecessors. Think about the archetypical control panel associated with a nuclear reactor or cockpit of a plane. There are hundreds of buttons, lights, and dials scattered across a large panel. In the analog world, this type of layout was necessary. The dials and gauges were physical items. They couldn’t simply be added, removed, or interchanged. They have to be hardwired to the panel. As a result, their layout was static. The human factors engineers of the day probably put considerable thought and research into the optimal placement of the dials and gauges. With that much information, it was important to ensure that the most critical and commonly used gauges were front and center and that the others were grouped according to how an operator might use them. However, given what we now know about attention and the brain’s ability to process information, with all of those dials and gauges even the best-designed dashboard had its limitations.
The digital age provides an opportunity to rethink the layout of dashboards to improve their effectiveness and efficiency. The dials and gauges are now virtual. They can appear and disappear in any way we choose. We no longer have to put every indicator in a static location.
For example, the system can dynamically arrange the various indicators based on user-defined categories such as current status (high risk, medium risk, low risk). Doesn’t it make more sense to have all of the metrics that are currently “high risk” show up in one place instead of forcing the user to search across the entire page to find them? Dynamic layouts also can provide multiple views. For example, there might be a status view a functional view. Maybe there is a view that shows business units by metric and another that shows metrics by business unit. Users don’t have to settle for a static layout. The dashboard can align with specific questions that the user is trying to answer.
In addition, because the dials and gauges are virtual, it is no longer necessary to display them all at once. You don’t need to access the four or five supporting metrics for a high-level metric unless there is an issue. How often do you look at supporting metrics when a main indicator is doing well? Those extra metrics just create distractions and clutter. Instead of putting them all on a single dashboard, you can have drill down dashboards that allow you to look at the detailed metrics in a more focused, purposeful way.
Today, more data is just a mouse-click (or finger tap) away. There is no need to display all of the data that you might need in a static manner when you can now dynamically call up the exact data that you need, when you need it.
Your data is more dynamic than ever. This drives huge improvements in decision-making. It’s time to take the next step. Make your dashboard dynamic as well so that you can fully unleash the power of your data.
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Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and author. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.
