Turning Your Data into Insights

Dashboards: Making Your Data
Accessible
Real-time, visual dashboards are a useful way to make the data for your KPIs meaningful and accessible.
Dashboards provide transparency, offer control over business decisions and can help foster a culture of
continuous improvement. Organisations can also save time on money on reporting.
Choosing Content
Dashboards should be simple and brief. This means that you need to be very selective about the
KPIs that you display. Ask yourself ‘what does this KPI show?’ and ‘what will the individual do with this
information?’
Wherever possible, keep dashboards similar for people at all levels within the organisation and cascade
the data up and down to each level of management. For example, make sure that an Area Manager can
see the same KPIs as his or her Site Managers, aggregated to show the performance across all sites. In
addition, each supervisor should have access to the dashboards of their direct reports. This way, both
parties can view the same information when preparing for meetings and reviewing performance.
Many organisations provide higher level management with a slightly more extensive dashboard
containing some additional KPIs that are relevant to strategic decision making.
Different types of dashboards can be used to present data that is meaningful for various individuals at
each level within the organisation.
• Operational Dashboards: used for business processes that change frequently to track the
current performance of key metrics and KPIs. They are updated regularly and often used to
monitor progress towards a target.
• Strategic Dashboards: provide an overview of aggregated data and the status of critical KPIs
throughout the business. They are updated on a recurring basis and typically used by senior
managers to monitor overall performance and progress towards key objectives.
• Analytical Dashboards: reporting tools used to analyse large volumes of data. They allow users
to investigate trends, predict outcomes and identify new insights relevant to performance and
strategy.
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