Accurate
and real-time information is a must for the CEOs and based on such information
top management makes critical decisions and also keeps an eye on the overall business
activities whether they are in line with attaining the organizational goals. CEOs
and top management executives for this purpose create their own control center
called an `executive dashboard'. According to Wikipedia, "An executive dashboard,
is a business management tool used to get a `bird's eye view' of business health.
It is a simple, yet powerful device to visually ascertain the status of a business
enterprise. Used to monitor the status of key business indicators, dashboards
use visual, at-a-glance displays of critical data pulled in from disparate business
systems to provide warnings, action notices, next steps, and summaries of business
conditions."
The
advent of the dashboard provides managers the fastest way to gather information
and make crucial decisions that affect the company's profitability. Initially,
they were designed and developed for the use of CEOs and top management executives
who make critical decisions. But in today's decentralized organizations where
critical decisions are being made by managers at various levels in the organizations,
dashboards are being developed and often customized to suit the specific requirements
of the managers. A dashboard supports a manager or executive by providing three
things. First, dashboard should answer fundamental questions about the health
of the business that can be financial, operational, or comparative in nature;
secondly it should alert the executive or manager when something goes wrong and
the way `alert' is provided is based on the needs of the business, and finally
the executive or manager should be able to use the information from a dashboard
to make decisions. |
