Key features for designing a dashboard.

• Author: Ganapati, Sukumar
• Position: [PM.sup.2] Connections: PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT & MANAGEMENT

Organizational dashboards are often likened to dashboards in plane cockpits and cars, which allow the pilot or the driver to see instant information about various metrics (e.g., speed, mileage, fuel level) and make travel adjustments or spot vehicular issues on the fly. Organizational dashboards can provide executives with an instant view of the organization's performance metrics on selected dimensions. Broadly, dashboards summarize "key performance metrics and underlying performance drivers"' Like vehicular dashboards, organizational dashboards display performance metrics in a visually engaging way, so that key information is easily understood in a short time.

The vehicular metaphor, however, should be viewed with some caution, since the purposes of vehicular dashboards and organizational dashboards are distinct from one another. Organizational dashboards require more human, political judgment on performance metrics than vehicular dashboards do. Car dashboards do not give historical data; they provide a snapshot of information at a particular time.

The dashboard has been defined as a "visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance." (2) In other words, it is a visual display or presentation mechanism; the term does not refer to a particular technology. Although there are many dashboard software vendors, dashboards are not solely software products. Before selecting dashboard software to serve as the platform for the organization's performance information, agencies must carefully select the performance metrics to be displayed in visually meaningful ways. Typically, dashboards integrate data from different sources and exhibit them through informative graphics with explanatory captions.

Data visualization allows readers to understand complex data in less time than it takes to read a full report. Unlike software that assists someone in making a presentation, the dashboard itself is the presentation. One attribute of the dashboard is that it "contains predefined conclusions relevant to the goal of the dashboard and relieves the reader from performing his own analysis." (3)

KINDS OF DASHBOARDS

In terms of their display, dashboards can be either static or dynamic:

* Static dashboards such as printed reports are not interactive and cannot be updated on the fly; they provide performance metrics for a specific timeframe.

* Dynamic dashboards such as web-based dashboards (or other forms) draw on live information from data warehouses, making them interactive and capable of manipulation by the user. Dynamic dashboards have the power to provide information in real time, based on how often the underlying data are updated.

Government agencies use both forms of dashboards. Static dashboards are often deployed over the Internet as PDF files that can be downloaded by users. Deploying dynamic dashboards over...