What are they?
A hot objective in business today is using information technology to “maximize the power of corporate information.” Organizations are looking to technology to simplify the way in which decision maker’s access and analyze data so that they can spend their time focusing on generating innovative ways to drive business rather than searching for the information they need and deciphering “old school” reports. One popular method of providing users with simplified information access and management is via
dashboards.
A dashboard is an application or browser-based interface that helps measure organizational performance in terms of organizational units, business processes, and individuals. It offers “gauges,” or snapshot views of performance information to assist users with decision making or performance-related tasks.
Dashboard or Scorecard?
Both dashboards and scorecards provide common methods for individuals to understand and benchmark their organizational or business process performance to determine how their contributions affect corporate-wide goals and objectives.
A scorecard is a system that measures and manages an organization’s progress toward strategic objectives. It also provides internal and industry benchmarks, goals, and targets that help individuals understand their contributions to the organization. This performance management should span the operational, tactical, and strategic aspects of the business and its decisions. Organizations can use a methodology derived from internal best practices or an external industry methodology, such as the widely used “Balanced Scorecard” developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. These performance indicators are available to users in an application or browser-based interface for reporting and analysis purposes on past, present, and potential benchmarks.
A dashboard, on the other hand, is a personalized, or role-based, snapshot of performance. Conceptually
a subset of a scorecard, it focuses on communicating performance information. Unlike the high-powered reporting and analytical functionality of scorecard applications, dashboards are geared toward simplified understanding of underlying performance information and may, like an automobile dashboard, have some basic controls and switches for feedback and collaboration tasks.
What does HR need to know?- A dashboard is an application or user interface that provides visualizations of key performance indicators. They are analogous to a car dashboard as they typically have gauges, meters, or other simple indicators that communicate underlying performance data.
- Dashboards measure not only financial indicators, but also such things as individual or team performance, customer satisfaction, learning and innovation, and internal performance measurements.
- Dashboards are often likened to “scorecards” but are really more of a subset of the much broader methodology represented by this approach. Dashboards are focused on communicating performance information on a tailored basis in a “what’s happening now” method whereas scorecards are much more sophisticated and geared to analysis and reporting based on current, historic, and potential benchmark data.
- In considering dashboard or scorecard initiatives, a clear definition of the business requirements and goals should be carefully considered prior to purchase. Beyond the corporate goals of the project, there are other factors such as data integration, established business rules, data quality, and other elements that go beyond the “delivery mechanism” offered by dashboards.
- There are a host of dashboard and scorecard software vendors (including leading business intelligence software vendors) that provide various levels of functionality “out of the box” to avoid the enormous custom development required to develop a solution in house.