What is a Dashboard in Business terms?

A Business Intelligence Dashboard visually represents the key organizational performance data in a near real time, user friendly manner that can be understood instantaneously. Technically speaking, a Dashboard is a visual representation that reflects the Key Performance Indicators(KPIs) of interest for managerial review and not only that it enables them to drill-down further.

Business Intelligence Dashboard is similar in function to a car dashboard in that it displays and provides access to the powerful analytical systems and key performance metrics in a form enabling business executives to analyze trends and more effectively manage their areas of responsibility.

A typical web based Business Intelligence Dashboard encompasses the following features:

• Web based Interface: Managers can gain broad visibility into the real-time key measurements of a business with the help of this multi-window, intuitive and interactive interface.
• Role Based View: Executives can clearly track their organization's overall performance against its goals.
• Reports: Configurable, user-level as well as management-level reports.
• Charting and Graphing: Dashboards are better known for their easy one-click charts and graphs that gives instant access to complex solutions.
• Pre-defined Performance Metrics: All the Dashboards are built with the common pre-defined metrics by default which eases the business user in tracking the regular yet important performance metrics.

Dashboards quickly convert and communicate the complex corporate data into a meaningful display of charts, graphs, gauges and other formats concurrently. A dynamic, intelligence Dashboard will allow the managers to drill-down data to go deeper into the anaysis. It eliminates the need to go through several reports, in one shot Dashboard gives a clear picture about how a company is performing in its critical areas.

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