Benefits Dashboards and scorecards can deliver the following benefits:
- A simple, easy to understand, view of organisational performance
- Summary of metrics on a single screen
- Structured view of performance data through an organisation
- Alerts to show areas which need attention
- Links to powerful analytic tools for further investigation
- Enable faster, better decision making
- And more...........
To discover how properly designed dashboards and scorecards can benefit your business, contact Altimus for a free consultation.
In a Nutshell Dashboards and scorecards are two well established ways of displaying corporate information in a compact and easy to use way. They are distinct and different and should be used in different contexts. Dashboards and scorecards will potentially be different for each part of the business, and will be tailored to specific needs. Dashboards and scorecards differ from Business Intelligence analytics in that they generally display a predetermined fixed set of data, whereas analytics allow for a wider exploration of data in a more ad-hoc format. There are many definitions that can be used for dashboards and scorecards so for clarity the Altimus definitions are as follows:
Dashboards follow similar logic to the dashboard of a car.
They will display a subset of the information about running the car in a format that is easy to see at a glance the most important information about driving the car, plus warnings that appear if something is going wrong like an oil pressure warning light – you don’t see it except when your attention needs to be drawn to it. A digital dashboard should replicate this idea, showing a subset of data – the key performance indicators (KPIs) plus alerts that show when something is going out of expected parameters. The dashboard will be viewed daily or perhaps more frequently to show the heartbeat of the business. A well designed dashboard will allow the key features to be absorbed at a glance. Where the analogy to a car breaks down is that it should always be possible from a digital dashboard to drill down into more detail and other functions in dashboard or other formats to investigate the data further.
Scorecards are more akin to the output of the diagnostic system attached to the car when it goes in for a service.
It will display a lot more detail about the business, and is generally reviewed at a monthly (or perhaps weekly) meeting. Scorecards will use similar graphical indicators to dashboards and will also be linked to other scorecards and analytic tools. Scorecards as a form of display are often used with a performance management framework known as the balanced scorecard. It is important to differentiate between scorecards as graphical displays and scorecards as the things which are being measured.
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