Dashboard (business)

Dashboard is a term now being used generally to refer to a web-based technology page on which real time information is collated from various sources in the business. The metaphor of dashboard is adopted here to emphasize the nature of the data being displayed on the page, it is a real-time analysis as to how a business is operating, just like on an automobile dashboard real time information is displayed about the performance of that vehicle.

Apple's Dashboard
More specifically, Dashboard is an application for Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system, used for hosting mini-applications known as Widgets. Dashboards in the wider sense of the term refers to applications that may look similar to the Apple Computer software, such as graphical dials, and may also have some of the similar type of software elements, but is essentially quite different software, even though inheriting some of the same elements. The major difference is that now the concept of a dashboard is an application showing data about a business, usually in a readily accessible form using graphics, summaries and lists.

Dashboards in Business Software
Rapidly rising in popularity as the new "face" of business intelligence is the enterprise dashboard due to the user-centric nature of its visually-based approach.

In many of the earlier "dashboard" applications the emphasis of creating a dashboard was the integration of information as in this Microsoft white paper:

A digital dashboard is a customized solution for knowledge workers that consolidates personal, team, corporate, and external information and provides single-click access to analytical and collaborative tools. It brings an integrated view of a company's knowledge sources to an individual's desktop, enabling better decision making by providing immediate access to key business information.

However, other uses of the term have placed an emphasis on a "dashboard" being an application providing real time data much the same way as a dashboard in an automobile is a real time display of performance or unusual "exceptions".

Collections of screenshots of implemented business dashboard are available for reference such as this Dashboard Screenshot Collection Blog.

Now common
While dashboards have been part of large-scale applications, such as installed by IBM, Siebel, Microsoft and many others, with the rise of on demand software services that provide affordable complex applications for small to medium businesses, the appearance of dashboards is now quite common.

Microsoft, Dimensional Insight, Siebel, Salesforce.com, SAP AG, and many other companies are offering products designed to give businesses an accurate snapshot of their operations. While each provides its own set of features, there are qualities to which all aspire -- such as simplicity. There are also open source tools which allow building of dashboards.