A Dashboard Will Magically Solve All My Problems by Ferenc Mantfeld

Ferenc Mantfeld, from See More Data, will be teaching Advanced SQL Programming from March 2-5 in our Salt Lake City training center. Ferenc is very knowledgeable about BI and SQL!

Dashboards as a business phrase have really only been around since the turn of the century, brought about by the visual impact of the dials and gauges in a car or aircraft, giving the viewer a real-time informative view of everything important to run the vehicle. But the concept of having executive level summary information from the various facets of the business is nothing new.

Dashboards are only as good as the depth, breadth and quality of the data behind the information.

Dashboards should present their information in an agreed-upon format and ideally should allow their target audience the ability to drilldown into the next level/s of detail to verify the summary information behind it.

If you build it, will they come? That depends on whether or not they (your target consumers of the dashboard/s) were consulted in the first place as to what they wanted and how they wanted to see and interact with it.

So before you rush out to build a dashboard, spend a little time investigating (talking to people) what, and more importantly, why, it should be built, and this time investment will yield tremendous increases in customer (user) satisfaction.