A KPI dashboard is about communicating information about your business performance in a way that is clear, meaningful, and actionable. There is no shortage of information available to decision-makers in your organization and information-overload is a very real possibility – this is the challenge that a KPI dashboard address.
There's two parts to a KPI dashboard: key performance indicators, and the dashboard itself. A key performance indicator (KPI) simplifies and enriches the thousands of bits of data surrounding your business to answer the question, "How is X business process performing?" A dashboard consolidates all of your KPIs on a single view, so you can make informed decisions based on the facts.
Learn more: What is a KPI?
Now that we know what a KPI dashboard does, let's take a look at some examples of how they work in practice.
KPI dashboards are specially suited for executives, since they typically want performance information summarized. They need to make decisions on a daily basis that drive the business forward, and rarely have the time or patience to sift through pages of reports to get answers about the business.
Sales teams are a perfect match for using dashboards, since they are among the busiest of all professions and rely on having the most current facts to do their job. Like executives, sales teams rarely have time to sort through pages of reports – they'd rather be on the road selling your product.
Marketing professionals use KPI dashboards to consolidate all of their campaign information on a single, intelligible view. This data may come many disparate sources such as Google Analytics, social media sites (Facebook, Twitter), CRM tools, and email campaigns. It's no wonder that marketers are increasingly using dashboards to monitor campaign ROI!
KPI dashboards and BI software is in the midst of a profound shift towards the cloud and mobile devices. This makes accessing dashboards easier than ever before and, more importantly, makes KPI dashboard software simpler and less expensive to deploy.
