Proliferation of Dashboards

April 5, 2005

I took note of this news item today about the increasing use of dashboard applications for business intelligence and performance management:

Market Survey Reveals Dashboard Use Extends Throughout the Enterprise; Noetix Dashboard Shares Enterprise Business Intelligence Across Business Units

Noetix commissioned this market survey for its own purposes, but the release does cite some interesting data about this trend:

"Half of the more than 50 top-level executives and IT managers surveyed at businesses with revenues between $100 million and $1 billion say they plan to purchase a dashboard in the near future in order to give managers and employees across their organizations increased visibility into business performance.

"Once exclusively targeted to high-level executives who needed more insight into the daily health of the business, dashboards are now being used by all levels of the organization. This further penetration across the enterprise is a result of an increased focus on performance management, accountability and regulatory compliance."

The release also touches on the design process involved in creating a dashboard application and raises some good questions. Where do you start in designing a dashboard? How do you assess the user's goals and needs? How do you decide what to include and what to leave out? I thought this quote gave some tantalizing clues into Noetix's design process for their product:

"While other solutions focus primarily on the speed at which they can create the graphical front end, Noetix zeroes in on the most difficult and time-consuming task of populating and managing dashboards. Noetix's auto-discovery tool maps to the relevant data and multiple data sources within the first few days of implementation. This unique process provides Noetix customers with the potential to bring immediate ROI to their organization."

AB -- 4/5/05

Related Tags: dashboard, business, Noetix, noetix, enterprise, dashboards