A Dash of Data

Get a quick read on your company by investing in software dashboards.

BY LEE GIMPEL | ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW SMITH

While driving to work, you usually know how fast you’re going, how much gas is in the tank, how hard the engine is working and whether it’s in danger of overheating. However, at the offi ce, you oft en don’t have the same handle on what’s going on. You don’t know how hard your employees are working, how many of your resources are being used and whether the company is humming along smoothly—or about to break down. Th at’s where soft ware dashboards come into play.

Just like the car readout panel, a soft ware dashboard provides a quick, easy-to-read visual representation of important metrics. Still relatively new as a concept, dashboards are winning converts; a 2007 study by Aberdeen Group found that 89% of the best-in-class companies surveyed either have them or plan to implement them to monitor their key performance indicators.

WHO USES DASHBOARDS

With high-level strategic metrics, soft ware dashboards started out as tools for executives, but, according to Shadan Malik, CEO of iDashboards and the author of Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, they are now becoming common to track issues for midlevel managers. Although dashboards are trickling down, Malik says it is still hard to conceive of very small companies using them today.

WHAT THEY MEASURE

In many cases, soft ware dashboards are replacing spreadsheets. Instead of getting grids of numbers once a day, week or quarter, managers get real-time depictions of what’s going on. A table might become a graphic that resembles a speedometer or a color-coded map—and it appears quickly, so you can isolate what needs attention and head off problems. Malik says that dashboards pull data from various applications, offering a window into, for example, inventory numbers from an ERP system, customer or sales data from a CRM package, and dollars and cents from accounting soft ware.

BUYING AND BUILDING

Of course, getting all of that data in one place and making it visually appealing—the old “picture is worth a thousand words” concept—takes some work. Many applications, from SAP to QuickBooks, allow you to export data to a dashboard—but doing so takes some IT know-how. Thus, Malik estimates that a basic, entry-level dashboard that requires three days of custom coding would run about $10,000. Like all custom IT work, older systems that don’t play nice with each other make it harder, and thus more expensive to create dashboards; licenses are generally sold per-person so more users may incur more cost.