So what exactly is a dashboard?
Well, an easy answer would be to say that it’s that thing in your car, usually above the steering wheel. But we’re not talking about that kind of dashboard. We’re talking about the ones that are used in businesses; healthcare, retail, manufacturing, or any industry where people want to visualize their data. If you think of an organization as a person, you can think of a dashboard as the visual display for a set of instruments monitoring the health of that person. Let’s say your department is the heart. You might only need to know information about the heart: heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and let’s throw in brain activity as well – sure it belongs to a different department, but it’s pretty crucial to the proper function of what we’re interested in. Those things I just listed would be considered metrics or performance indicators. A dashboard would display all of the metrics that are vital to understanding our specific area of interest. What you want from a good dashboard is to be able to understand what is happening at a glance. You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time trying to decipher what it is that you are looking at. Dashboards are there to save you time by displaying the information that is key to you.
Read Full Article: A Very High Level Intro to Dashboards
Source: Dashboard Insight