BI - Too many dashboards will bog you down

In this article in The Financial Times, Charles Batchelor reports on a BI implementation done within Dane Group, a UK supplier of building facades and architectural metalwork. The business challenges stated sound all too familiar:  latency of data, quality of data, and presenting large amounts of data.

The title of the article opines that too many dashboards will bog you down. However, it’s quite a misleading headline. If there are too dashboards within an organization that are making it harder for someone to make informed decisions, the real problem is the development of the critical success factors within an organization. I.e. it’s more likely that the dashboards are not aligning strategic goals with operational activities.

I’m a big proponent of dashboards for the entire workforce - dashboards are a great way for any information worker to quickly understand vast amounts of data and to monitor the performance of their business at a glance. Those with too many dashboards that lessen business clarity should read the following article - Finding your organization’s critical success factors: the missing link in performance management.