Introduction to Dashboards

Chartio lets you build dashboards that capture the most important data in your business. To be effective, they should be designed with attention to your business needs and the overall user experience. Here, we'll cover some of the dashboard basics and best practices.

A Bit of History

The precursor to the modern dashboard, Executive Information Systems (EISs), was first developed in the 1980s. Technological limitations made using EISs quite difficult and unreliable. It wasn't until both data warehousing and analytical processing matured that the present-day dashboard really caught its stride.

The use of dashboards really caught on fire during as the Balanced Scorecard gained popularity. Dashboards were effective in tracking business performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) and have evolved both in form and substance since.

Types of Dashboards

Dashboards can be classified as either strategic, analytical or operational.

Strategic

Strategic dashboards help business managers gain an overview of the pulse of their business. The focus here is on high level performance, usually on a daily (or greater) timeframe. An example of this is a dashboard that shows current quarterly sales against a pre-defined target.

Analytic

Analytic dashboards focus on a level of detail greater than strategic ones. The idea is to let the end-user really explore their data through context and drill downs. An example of this is a dashboard that allows the end-user to drill down into their sales data to find the best performing products by region, store and against historical data.

Operational

Operational dashboards are designed to capture real-time data where momentary fluctuations might require attention. An example of this is a dashboard that tracks page load time and errors for a web application.

Where Does Chartio Fit In?

Chartio supports both strategic and tactical dashboards. Because you can create multiple dashboards in your Chartio account, you can assign some to contain higher-level views of your business (strategic) while others may contain more detail and context (tactical). Classifications aside, it's important to note, that dashboards do not necessarily have to be either completely strategic, tactical or operational. These definitions are only rough guidelines. In practice, effective dashboards may display strategic and tactical data side by side or include a bit of operational data. Regardless of what type of dashboard you construct, the most important considerations to bear in mind are the business goals and the ultimate audience.