What does a dashboard do?

Data is all around us, and it has changed our lives in many ways - including in the fast-paced world of business. Digital data empowers organizations across sectors to improve their processes, initiatives, and innovations using the power of insight. But with so many stats, facts, and figures in today’s hyper-connected age, knowing which information to work with can seem like a minefield.

Enter data dashboards: one of history’s best business intelligence innovations.

To help you understand the business-boosting power of dashboards, we’re going to explore a definitive data dashboard definition, explain the importance of dashboard data, and look at a selection of real-world data dashboard examples.

To gain a working understanding of the concepts outlined in this guide, we must first ask the question, ‘What is a data dashboard?” So, let’s start with an official definition:

What Is a Data Dashboard?

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A data dashboard is a tool that provides a centralized, interactive means of monitoring, measuring, analyzing, and extracting relevant business insights from different datasets in key areas while displaying information in an interactive, intuitive, and visual way.

They offer users a comprehensive overview of their company’s various internal departments, goals, initiatives, processes, or projects. These are measured through key performance indicators (KPIs), which provide insights that help to foster growth and improvement.

Online dashboards provide immediate navigable access to actionable analytics that has the power to boost your bottom line through continual commercial evolution.

To properly define dashboards, you need to consider the fact that, without the existence of dashboards and dashboard reporting practices, businesses would need to sift through colossal stacks of unstructured data, which is both inefficient and time-consuming. Alternatively, a business would have to ‘shoot in the dark’ concerning its most critical processes, projects, and internal insights, which is far from ideal in today’s world.

Now that you understand a clearly defined dashboard meaning, let’s move onto one of the primary functions of data dashboards: answering critical business questions.

What Is The Purpose Of A Data Dashboard?

As mentioned earlier, a data dashboard has the ability to answer a host of business-related questions based on your specific goals, aims, and strategies.

By taking raw data from a number of sources and consolidating it before presenting it in a tailored, customized visual way, data dashboards can help make sense of your company’s most valuable data and empower you to find actionable answers to your most burning business questions.

Through linking with specific KPIs that align with your business goals, you can drill down into specific pockets of information, creating benchmarks, and measuring your success on a continual basis.

In doing so, your business will be data-driven, and as a direct result – more successful. To find out more about dashboards and key performance indicators, explore our ever-expanding collection of various business-boosting KPI examples and templates.

Our Top 20 Data Dashboard Examples & Templates

Now it’s time to delve deeper into 20 prime real-world digital dashboards tailored for a host of different sectors and industries.

For a more detailed glance, you can check out 80 or more business dashboard examples suited to an ever wider range of business functions (marketing, sales, finance, management, etc.) and industries (healthcare, retail, logistics, manufacturing, etc.).

For now, let’s explore our personal 20. Prepare to be inspired...

1) Management KPI Dashboard

Our first data dashboard template is a management dashboard. It is a good example of a “higher level” dashboard for a C-level executive. You’ll notice that this example is focused on important management KPIs like:

• Number of new customers compared to targets
• The average revenue per customer
• Customer acquisition cost
• Gross revenue, target revenue, and last year’s revenue

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The example above does a great job of keeping things focused and avoids clutter through the liberal use of white space.

2) Financial KPI Dashboard

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Maintaining your financial health and efficiency is pivotal to the continual growth and evolution of your business. Without keeping your fiscal processes water-tight, your organization will essentially become a leaky tap, draining your budgets dry right under your nose.

As one of our most widely used financial data analytics tools, our financial KPI dashboard will tell you all you need to know about your business’s ongoing fiscal health by offering digestible visualizations on every key financial area of the business.

Here, you can analyze cash conversion cycle efficiency and vendor payment error trends while examining budget variance trends and breaking down existing assets as well as liabilities.

Through careful monitoring of this most insightful of examples, you will gain the power to spot emerging trends, troubleshoot any financial issues before they harm the business, and enhance your supplier relationships.

When you can access your working capital calculations ‘at a glance,’ monitoring your company’s overall financial health on any given day, week, or month will become a swift, simple process, giving you the time and space to develop initiatives to grow the business.

3) Sales Cycle Length Dashboard

This sales dashboard below is a sales manager’s dream. This dashboard example breaks down how long customers are taking to move through your funnel, on average. It expands on this by showing how different sales managers are performing compared to one another.

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Finally, it makes things even more nitty-gritty by breaking down these sales KPIs into how many people are at each stage of the funnel and how long each stage lasts on average.

4) IT Project Management Dashboard

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In many ways, your IT department is the backbone of your business - it’s what keeps your business operational.

Most IT operatives are overstretched and under pressure, but by working with the right data visualizations, you can give your department the tools to become smarter, more efficient, and more impactful.

Our IT project management dashboard offers a wealth of at-a-glance insights geared towards reducing project turnaround times while enhancing efficiency in key areas, including total tickets vs. open tickets, projects delivered on budget, and average handling times.

All KPIs complement each other, shedding light on real-time workloads, overdue tasks, budgetary trends, upcoming deadlines, and more. This perfectly balanced mix of metrics will help everyone within your IT department balance their personal workloads while gaining the insight required to make strategic enhancements and deliver projects with consistent success.

By consolidating every key piece of information in one central place, every member of your IT team can get on the same page, working cohesively to resolve emerging issues with maximum efficiency while helping one another tackle the various stages of every vital IT project with complete confidence.

5) Procurement Data Analytics Dashboard

Procurement, a strategic function that connects the needs of a company with contractors, suppliers, freelancers, or agencies, e.g., serves as a critical component that requires up to date data, easy monitoring processes, and advanced automation capabilities that will optimize the procurement department and save countless working hours.

It's imperative to track the supplier management processes in the most efficient way, otherwise, companies risk losing precious information and face difficulties in short-term as well as long-term business operations. That's why a procurement dashboard helps professionals to easily understand large volumes of data and extract meaningful insights within minutes.

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This example focuses on supplier delivery management and stats about the performance. At the top, we can see a quick overview of the defect rate, on-time supplies, supplier availability, and lead time in days. The defect rate should be low as possible, as this is one of the procurement KPIs that measures how many products received are not compliant with product specifications but also don't meet quality standards. After all, the final quality of the product is an essential indicator of the suppliers' reliability since higher amounts of defects would mean more bottlenecks in the entire process.

The details of each suppliers' defect rate and defect type are visualized on the bottom left, where you can see how well the top 6 suppliers have been performing. Supplier number 1 is considered the most reliable since the defect rate is quite low and the type of defect has no impact on the product so there could be issues in delivery processes or payments.

You can also compare the delivery time between different suppliers and take a look if there are additional possibilities to negotiate faster deliveries. In this case, you can see that supplier number 4 has never been late, although it has fewer early deliveries in comparison to supplier numbers 1 and 2.

With the help of detailed monitoring processes, each industry professional or manager can build and automate a comprehensive procurement report that will optimize the supplier delivery mechanisms and increase the productivity levels of everyone involved.

6) Web Analytics Dashboard

If you use digital marketing heavily in your business, this marketing dashboard below will soon become your best friend. Focused on web analytics, this example will provide you with substantial visualizations that you can dig deeper into and examine all web-related marketing data.

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This data dashboard template gives you a number of useful marketing KPIs at a glance, giving you the answers to questions like:

• How many people are visiting your website?
• How many pages are they looking at?
• How long are they staying?
• How many people are converting?

This example goes even further by breaking down your top converting channels, campaigns, and pages, and showing how much of your traffic is coming from each channel.

This kind of information makes it really easy to know where you should prioritize your time and energy.

7) Human Resources Data Dashboard

HR is becoming more data-driven and modern software solutions have entered the human resources realm in order to make recruiting and talent management operations more effective and focused on unbiased quality. Especially today, when attracting and keeping the right talent has become a difficult challenge for companies that are faced with scarce talents, and a high level of competition, particularly in the IT industry. In fact, 43% of human resources professionals say they struggle with the hiring process because of competition from other employers. Even when they hire the right candidate, there is often a scenario where talents leave because of low satisfaction levels or a better offer from the competition.

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A modern HR dashboard, focused on talent management, as we can see above, helps professionals in identifying issues and potential negative impacts on the business by analyzing important metrics focused on talents. For example, the talent turnover rate is an HR KPI that will show you which department has difficulties in retaining top talent. In our example above, you can see that the financial department deals with the highest voluntary turnover so it might make sense to examine why.

The talent satisfaction is expressed through the net promoter score (NPS) and it's evident that the highest satisfaction is achieved after a 5-year employment period, although the first year is also very near result-wise.

The talent rating is expressed by the employment period and category. It's critical to conduct regular feedback and meetings in order to develop communication as well as talent capabilities. If there is a particular lack of skills present in the assessment process, it would make sense to invest in employees and provide additional educational opportunities. That way, the company can profit, too.

You can also take a look at a quick overview of the hiring stats that include the time to fill, training costs, new hires, and cost per hire. The total amount of employees and monthly salary, as well as vacancies, will provide you with an at-a-glance overview of the talent management stats within the first quarter of the year.

This dashboard description includes all-important information essential to developing a modern HR report for professionals, managers, and VPs that need to compete to attract the best possible candidates and keep them in the long run.

One of our next database dashboard examples shows processes in the manufacturing industry.

8) Manufacturing Production Dashboard

If your company is in the manufacturing business, a production dashboard will prove invaluable, as seen in this example:

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With manufacturing KPIs for your total production volume, your sales revenue, your units ordered, and your top-performing machines, you have your finger on the pulse of your factory.

Finally, the refunded items by reason graph serves as an “early warning sign” for manufacturing defects.

9) Marketing Performance Dashboard

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A data analytics dashboard packed with insight, this marketing-centric innovation is an effective way of ensuring a consistently healthy return on investment (ROI).

To maximize the value of your promotional campaigns and initiatives, engaging your audience through the right touchpoints, channels, and mediums at exactly the right times is vital. If you fail to do so, you’re merely marketing to the void and throwing your budget into the abyss.

Our digital marketing report example provides a panoramic breakdown of your campaigns’ performance by allowing you to drill down into essential metrics, including click-through rates (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per acquisition (CPA).

By analyzing these insightful KPIs and comparing the performance of various campaigns from one central location, you can pinpoint any inefficiencies while capitalizing on your marketing strengths. This deep level of visual insight will help you understand how your customers engage with your marketing materials while guiding you towards the content and strategies that earn the best results. And when you do that, you will see a significant boost in revenue as well as audience growth.

10) Logistics Transportation Dashboard

This particular dashboard example shows how big data and data analytics can impact the logistics industry. When it comes to logistics, every moment matters, and you want as many deliveries as possible to be on time.

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This logistics dashboard makes it easy to adjust the fleet performance and overall transportation performance since the delivery status, fleet efficiency, average loading time, and other logistics KPIs will enable you to generate actionable insights, examine various details, and identify trends in your transportation management processes.

11) Cash Management Dashboard

Naturally, your cash flow is integral to the ongoing health of your business. By managing your income, expenditure, liquidity, and financial relationships effectively, you’ll be able to meet your monetary targets, gain greater access to credit, and ensure your business is fortified against any unforeseen circumstances.

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This dynamic financial dashboard features all of the functions and KPIs to keep every element of your finances afloat, helping you to optimize your financial activity for ongoing growth and success. An essential data dashboard-type for organizations across industries.

12) Customer Support KPI Dashboard

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Niche or sector aside, offering your clients or customers an exceptional level of customer support is no longer an added luxury - it’s essential. No exceptions. No compromises. Without providing a valuable personal customer experience, your business will suffer. And harnessing the right data is the most effective way to avoid falling behind your competitors.

Our dynamic customer service dashboard serves up a perfect storm of visual information that helps everyone in a consumer-facing role (from support agents and team leaders to senior managers, VPs, and beyond) perform their role better.

With KPIs including service level, support costs vs. revenue, and customer satisfaction rates all on the menu, this well-rounded data analytics dashboard provides every metric required to reduce service costs, monitor support trends, and tackle any glaring customer-facing issues head-on.

By tracking this KPI dashboard regularly, you will reduce the time your agents take to solve service issues, streamline your departmental processes, and ultimately meet the needs of your customers with confidence and consistency. In turn, you will boost your brand reputation, increase your revenue, and improve customer loyalty - three key ingredients of commercial success.

13) Retail Data Dashboard Example

What dashboards in the retail industry provide is, in short, an indispensable means of reporting and centralizing massive volumes of information. No matter the size of a company, a retail dashboard specifically designed for online retailers, has immense importance in optimizing online processes and providing a centralized point of access for all retail-related data.

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Achieving success in online retail highly depends on data collection, management, monitoring, and optimizing processes in order to increase productivity and, consequently, revenue. Moreover, customers are more informed and demanding than ever before, and that's why having all the data in a central place is critical. That will enable you to act swiftly and ensure high levels of customer satisfaction.

The example starts with the return reasons, one of the most important retail KPIs that are closely connected with the rate of return and affect the quality assessment. The perfect order rate and the number of total orders dig deeper into the stats over a longer period of time. That way, you can adjust your retail analytics strategies more carefully and increase your efficiency.

Top sellers by orders will tell you if you need to adjust your offers or invest more into marketing the best performing pieces in your inventory.

14) Salesforce Data Analytics Dashboard

In today's competitive environment, Salesforce is one of the tools critical for managing and optimizing customer relationship processes. With the help of a professional Salesforce dashboard, monitoring and optimizing the sales lifecycle, connecting with other data sources, and automating the reporting processes is done quicker than ever before.

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Cold calling is still an effective strategy to gain new customers, and the outbound calls dashboard helps to determine whether the team is doing a great job needs additional help, or develops a more productive sales environment. The dashboard shows an overview of the number of outbound calls, demos, contracts closed as well as the contract value. On the right side, you can see an outline of 5 agents and their performance in the last month which can help you in creating detailed salesforce reports and optimize further.

At the bottom, you can see the calls and contact rate per weekday and notice how the mid-week contact rate rises. That way, you can adjust your future planning and cold calling operations more effectively.

15) Hospital KPI Dashboard

Hospitals are the beating heart of the health sector – without them, where would we be? With so much activity to analyze and so many resources to consider, implementing healthcare analytics software that includes data dashboard technology in hospitals is essential in this day and age.

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Covering treatment costs, financial efficiency, and various critical aspects of patient care, this hospital dashboard plays a pivotal part in ironing out any operational efficiencies on a daily basis. Moreover, with the insights gained from this dashboard, hospitals stand to increase mortality rates, make wiser investments, and ensure cohesive communication throughout the institution.

16) Employee Performance Dashboard

It doesn't matter what you sell or offer – if your employees aren’t happy, motivated, and performing to the best of their abilities, your entire organization will suffer. That's why we're bringing you another HR-focused example created with a professional HR analytics software.

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A comprehensive staff-centric innovation, the employee performance dashboard drills down into every major aspect of personnel management, from absenteeism rates and overtime hours to productivity levels and training costs. The insights here help offer support and motivation where needed, boosting staff engagement, and improving your management strategies.

17) Energy Management Dashboard

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Many businesses overlook the financial impact of powering their everyday operations. But the average business uses between 100 and 150 kWh every year. And for organizations with multiple sites or branches, this figure is likely to at least quadruple.

Driving down your energy consumption will not only save you a significant level of annual costs, but it will also make your business greener and more sustainable.

An invaluable dashboard for any scaling business, our energy management platform offers a clearcut visualization of your energy sources and consumption while allowing you to compare your usage to other sectors.

Our energy dashboard also displays visual data and trends based on any power cuts you’ve experienced over a certain period. This insightful dashboard example will give you a greater understanding of how your business consumes energy while giving you the insight you need to nip any inefficiencies in the bud. You will save money and keep your operations flowing in the process.

This is an essential data analysis dashboard for cementing sustainable financial growth while consistently eliminating unnecessary wastage.

18) IT Data Analytics Dashboard

In IT, a dashboard means extreme value and it's one of the tools needed to ensure projects are delivered on time, tickets managed successfully, and costs are under control. Especially for chief technology officers, who need to have an overview of strategic management and lead the technological resources in alignment with business goals and needs.

That said, an IT dashboard that centralizes multiple touchpoints has immense value for leaders and professionals in the IT advancements of a company. Let's take a closer look at how to read our example focused on IT leadership.

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The visual is organized into 4 main sections that modern CTOs need to monitor and evaluate in order to gain and keep positive business development: learning, internal, finance/customers, and users. Let's take a quick look at each.

The learning section is divided into IT KPIs critical for managing tickets and bugs as well as the team's attrition rate. You can immediately spot where issues are concentrated, in this case, the restore success rate has slightly worsened this month in comparison to the last. We can see that the development of other metrics such as reopened tickets is better but also look at critical bugs over a longer timeframe.

The internal part has a bit more issues in metrics such as the meantime to repair, availability, and accuracy of estimates. For the latter, that means that the team didn't estimate their workload correctly but it would make sense to examine why and what exactly happened. The other 2 metrics, mean time between failures and the downtime due to security have shown positive development in comparison to last month. This shows you which parts of your strategy you need to focus on more in order to bring success in every aspect of the technological development and management of a company.

On the bottom part, you can see the financial and customer aspects as well as the development of users through a 12-month period. These aspects are essential in IT analytics in order to reach sustainable development since costs are oftentimes an issue in IT projects as well as support expenses.

To learn more about project management, you can explore our guide on project management dashboards.

19) Content Quality Control Dashboard

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In an increasingly digital world, consumers expect a great deal of value from brands and businesses. To earn consumer loyalty and trust, creating content that not only solves your audience’s pain points but also inspires and engages will push you ahead of the pack.

An informational innovation, our content quality control dashboard offers a detailed breakdown of your article and content creation processes. Here, you can analyze your best-performing content, explore how long each phase of your story creation process takes, and gain an understanding of how easy your content is to read. 

By working with every informational aspect of this content-centric dashboard, you will know exactly what types of content engage your audience and earn the best results. As a result, you can tweak and enhance your content marketing strategy and article creation processes for ongoing brand awareness, commercial growth, and customer retention growth.

Content is one of the most vital components of any business strategy. Without knowing what works and what doesn’t, you’re unlikely to ever reach your full potential. In terms of content creation, this dashboard created with a professional media analytics software will help you get where you need to be and beyond.

20) FMCG KPI Dashboard

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Managing your fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) processes with pinpoint accuracy will make your supply chain stronger, smoother, and more efficient than ever before. Conversely, if you allow your FMCG initiatives to dwindle, your supply chain will fall apart, and you will lose money.

Our FMCG dashboard will help you get a firm grip on every fast-moving part of your supply chain, which you probably know is a real challenge.

By using this interactive visualizations to your advantage, you will gain a working insight into how swiftly you’re selling your goods within their freshness date, check FMCG stock levels in real-time, examine your inventory turnover over specific timeframes, and analyze your average time to sell specific categories of items.

With access to every essential FMCG insight in one central location, you will be able to weed out any glaring fast-moving supply chain inefficiencies while managing your stock and fulfillment strategies in a way that consistently saves time and money.

Fast-moving goods need to be handled with care at every stage of the supply chain while being delivered to the right parties at the right time. This highly intuitive tool will help you steer clear of any brand-damaging fulfillment calamities while keeping your supply chain fluent from end to end. In turn, you will see a boost to your business’s bottom line.

The Top 10 Benefits Of Data Dashboards

Now that you have at least a basic understanding of what is a data dashboard and how it can benefit your company, let’s dig deeper into some of its uses.

1. They Are Customizable

One of the biggest advantages data dashboards have over more traditional spreadsheets is that they are almost infinitely customizable and flexible. This makes sense operationally, as the same data is used in very different ways by different people in your company.

For example, let’s say you have all of your sales data from the past quarter in a spreadsheet. While you can dig through the spreadsheet for details, you have to look at all the information at once. This can affect your ability to focus. But using an effective sales report created with a dashboard, you could easily have one layout optimized for a specific sales representative, showing their:

• Deal closing rates
• Average order size
• Lifetime value (LTV) of customers closed

A sales manager might see each of these data sets for each of their sales reps, and a C-level executive won’t see any of this. They’ll see averages of LTV, order sizes, and overall closing rates, along with other “bigger picture data.”

2. They Are Interactive

Let’s say our sales executive wanted to dig deeper into the data around a promising new hire. If she was using a dashboard software, she could simply tap a few buttons on her dashboard and get to a view similar to that of the sales manager. Conversely, if the sales manager (or even the rep) wanted to understand how their job role fits into the company as a whole, they could “zoom out” as needed. This kind of “focus adjustment” just isn’t possible with spreadsheets.

When presenting data and communicating insights, it is important to create a dialogue – no one likes being preached throughout a whole presentation. Letting your audience being part of it thanks to interactive dashboard features will convey your message more efficiently. By using real-time data and manipulating it live, encouraging your listeners to ask questions and drill down the information by themselves, explore on their own, they will be much more engaged in the discussion. The interactivity is especially interesting in dashboarding with a diverse audience: newcomers are onboarded easily while experts can dig deeper into the data for more insights.

3. They Allow For Real-Time Monitoring

The business world changes quickly.

If you’re still running analytical reports by sending them to your IT department and then waiting to get them back, your company is missing out on situations where agility wins. If you have to wait days or weeks to get data on a situation, it might be too late to make necessary changes.

For example, with real-time monitoring, you can see how a phone outreach campaign is going for a big product launch you have coming up. If a week into the campaign, you notice that you’re not getting any results via your dashboard, you can make a quick intervention and switch to digital ads, direct mail, or some other strategy.

You’re saving yourself a big opportunity cost here.

4. All Of Your Data Is In One Place

When you use dashboards, you have one centralized location where all of your users can access your data.

This is in contrast to a myriad of spreadsheets, software, and databases that represent the legacy approach. While all of your PPC data is on Facebook, while all of your customer data is in your CRM software, and your income/loss statements are in your mainframe (which is running on the 1980s software and requires an IT staff member to operate). Not pretty.

Instead, with 24/7/365 dashboard solutions like datapine, if someone wants to make a data-driven decision or presentation at the next staff meeting, all they have to do is pull out their tablet.

5. They Are Intuitive

Let’s be honest – most human beings find it easier to understand a graph than a long, tedious Excel spreadsheet full of numbers. Dashboards allow you to “tease out” patterns in your data that you might not see in a purely numerical format.

Additionally, people have different levels of “tech-savvy.” Some users may find even an Excel document to be quite difficult to work with. Dashboards make everything accessible.

6. They Get Everyone On The Same Page

In order to have a dashboard culture, everyone on your team needs to be on board. That can’t happen if some employees don’t have the same access to data that other employees do, whether due to technical comfort levels or simply due to data being spread out.

When everyone on your team is looking at the same set of numbers, they can understand the team’s mission in a much more tangible way. You can point to sales numbers and really connect them with future goals and projections.

This kind of connection is priceless.

7. They Force You To Focus

Perhaps the biggest reason to use dashboards for understanding your data is that they force you to focus.

One of the key points to remember when creating a stunning dashboard is that you shouldn’t overwhelm it with too many KPIs. From a visual and aesthetic perspective, things get cluttered if you put too much on the screen. From an effectiveness standpoint, your mind starts to wonder what’s important.

Therefore, if you’re using dashboards the right way, your brain always knows what KPIs are important – the ones on the screen. You can even make more important KPIs bigger, further reinforcing their status in your mind.

As Tony Robbins says, “Where focus goes, energy flows.” In other words, you take action on what you focus on. Dashboards make it easy to focus on what’s truly important.

8. They Help You To Multitask

Multitasking is a useful skill, but in business, trying to absorb too much information or tackle too many tasks at once can prove to be detrimental, with projects becoming convoluted and mistakes being made.

However, when it comes to data analytics, a modern dashboard consolidates all critical insights from various data sources through data connectors and presents them in a dynamic visual format. By being able to view a multitude of organized, visually digestible information in one central space, you can quickly extract several pieces of information at once, empowering you to complete projects swiftly with a greater level of success and accuracy.

9. They Are Predictive

Dashboards aren’t psychic, but that can help you predict the direction your business is going based on current trends, metrics, and insights. If you don’t like the way particular elements of your business are going, digital dashboards will give you the intelligence you’ll need to make enhancements that will help to cement your future success.

By working with a mix of past insights, real-time data, and detailed patterns, dashboards provide a panoramic overview of specific areas of your business. If you feel something is going to cost you unnecessary investment in the future, you’ll be able to improve your financial strategy; if you see something worth capitalizing on, you can create a campaign or initiative around it.

Moreover, as modern data dashboards securely store everything on the cloud, access to predictive insights is literally 247 - 365 days a year. All you need is a web connection and you can start formulating strategies wherever you are in the world, at any time.

10. They Help You To Tell Stories With Your Data

When it comes to sharing your data with others, prompting any form of progressive action requires others to understand the message you’re trying to convey.

To help other departments within your organization, or external partners, get on board with your data-driven insights, you need to tell a story with your data. An interactive digital dashboard will help you do just that.

Through seamless data visualization, a dashboard can help you create a narrative with the information delivered through your KPIs. In gaining the ability to do so effectively, you’ll be able to work more cohesively towards your goals and accelerate the success of your business exponentially.

We’ll now discuss the primary features or benefits of BI-powered dashboards and take a glimpse at legacy solutions.

How Data Dashboards Are Used In BI

Now that we’ve asked the question, ‘what is a dashboard?’ and looked at the primary functions of these powerful tools, let’s examine them in a business intelligence context.

When it comes to business intelligence, data dashboards play a pivotal role.

Business intelligence (BI) is a term that relates to the applications, infrastructure, practices,  and tools that empower businesses to access a broad range of analytical data for improvement, campaign optimization, and enhanced decision-making that maximizes performance.

A data dashboard is the vessel – or tool – that materializes BI practices, converting, visualizing, and communicating complex business data into meaningful, actionable insights.

BI dashboard tools bestow business users with the ability to drill down even deeper into analytical data to capitalize on strengths, spot weaknesses, and make changes that will benefit the future of their organization.

Digital dashboards have essentially quashed the necessity to sift through multiple reporting tools; instead, they access dynamic insights – often in real-time. With such dashboards, users can also customize settings, functionality, and KPIs to optimize their dashboards to suit their specific needs.

To summarize, in the context of BI, data dashboards are used for:

• Deep-level insight: Drilling down deeper into key aspects of your business’s daily, weekly, and monthly operations to create initiatives for increased efficiency.
• Information sharing: To facilitate the online data visualization of your most valuable data so that you can share key insights with other stakeholders both internally and outside the organization.
• Performance measurement: By working with interactive KPI dashboards, you can set specific business tasks, measuring your performance while working towards clearly defined milestones for enhanced business success.
• Forecasting: As dashboards are equipped with predictive analytics, it’s possible to spot trends and patterns that will help you develop initiatives and make preparations for future business success.

A data dashboard assists in 3 key business elements: strategy, planning, and analytics. As we have expounded on the data dashboard definition, showed you real-life examples, now we will focus on legacy data solutions.

Legacy Data Solutions

Before dashboards, it was much harder to get an intuitive grasp of your company’s performance through data-driven intelligence.

Because a huge amount of data existed in a company’s mainframe computer (particularly data related to profits, costs, revenue, etc.), you would often need IT professionals to prepare data reports for you.

Why? Well, many of these mainframe computers are still running legacy software designed in the 1970s or 1980s. These innovations offer no swipe-able screens or easy-to-use interfaces.

 These are more “command line” types of machines, and other issues include:

• The time delay associated with requesting reports
• Data is spread out amongst many databases
• Lack of different data visualization types

Due to all of these problems, dashboards were developed. They help businesses answer the question “How can we use all the data we have about our company and our customers in order to make better informed, data-driven decisions that lead to more revenue and profits?”

Behind the scenes, with the help of a dashboard builder, you can integrate all of the information you need from all of the different data sources your company has. However, what you (the end-user) see are simple tables, charts, and graphs – all in real-time.

Ready To Get Started With Data?

We’ve asked the question, ‘What is a data dashboard?’ and delved deep into the dynamics of data dashboard software, and one thing’s for sure: if you work with your business’s insights the right way, you will propel your business to new heights.

Now that you understand the unrivaled power of data dashboards, we’re sure you’re keen to get started. The good news is, harassing the power of data dashboards is a few clicks away. datapine’s innovative dashboards are intuitive, interactive, and completely customizable, displaying all of your most critical data in real-time in one easy-access location.

To find out more about what dashboards can do for you, sign up for a 14-day trial, completely free!