Intelligent Enterprise

Companies that are actively using dashboards are able to gain visibility into the metrics that are driving their business. As a result, these firms are achieving drastically higher performance than their peers.

These are among the key findings of a new report from Aberdeen Group that shows that from the executive management team down to the line-level business managers and front-line employees, employees at all levels and functions are deriving value from the business visibility that dashboard tools provide. Aberdeen's Executive Dashboards: The Key to Unlocking Double Digit Profit Growth report finds that Best-in-Class companies are employing both strategic and tactical dashboards in order to drive double-digit improvements in profitability and have achieved substantial increases in customer service and sales performance.

As the economy fluctuates and information flows more quickly, the ability to gain visibility into business performance is crucial to compete in a global marketplace and foster growth. The problem for many companies is that the key metrics that dictate performance, the aspects of their business that they care most about, are constantly changing. These organizations struggle to make decisions based on the most up-to-date, relevant information.

This article, which is an executive summary of Aberdeen's full Executive Dashboards report, explains that Best-in-Class companies are not choosing between strategic and tactical approaches to dashboard implementation but rather are combining the two approaches to provide a comprehensive set of data visualizations. By spreading dashboard capabilities to more users within the organization, Best-in-Class companies consistently drive higher operating profits, better customer service and more effective sales performance.

Building the Case for Dashboards

Aberdeen's September 2008 benchmark report, Operational KPIs and Performance Management, demonstrated the tie-in between BI dashboard use and the need for more informed decisions. According to the research, the top business pressure driving companies to measure operational KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) through the use of dashboard technology is the need to replace "gut-feel" decisions with fact-based decisions.

Particularly in light of today's volatile market, organizations are developing strategies to better visualize how their business is changing and to react more quickly and intelligently to threats and opportunities. Aberdeen's research shows that those companies that have employed dashboard technology to improve business visibility have seen marked performance improvements over their peers not currently using dashboards (click on the "Dashboard Performance" chart at right).

While information is never perfect and rarely delivered in true real-time, there is nevertheless a discernable need for faster and more "digestible" information. In the full BI stack from data collection and assembly to information delivery, dashboards represent the true front-end and are the most "user-facing" solution geared towards improving business visibility. As such, dashboards are bridging the gap between some of the more heavy-handed IT functions and the business leaders that rely on timely, accurate data. Prior Aberdeen research has revealed that a top pressure driving BI usage is the need to deliver analytical capability to more non-technical end users. The ease of use and intuitive graphical representations that most dashboards provide make these tools perhaps the most logical medium for accomplishing a wide and diverse deployment of analytical capability.

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