Executive Dashboards

What is an Executive Dashboard? The business landscape that companies face today is changing at ever rapid pace. To better detect changes in their business, executives need a quick way to see all the business metrics pertaining to their company's' performance. This information could include company sales forecast, current revenue, expense, inventory level, and other business metrics. Executive dashobards are basically real-time business performance reports tailored for executive use.

Executive Dashboards are offered by many business intelligence vendors that culls information from a variety of sources within the company. In order to aggregate and condense the information into quickly understandable information, executive dashboards much integrate with a variety of internal business systems in order to extract the relevant information. Typically these real-time executive dashboards are updated in real-time to let executives get up-to-the-minute view just like instrumentations in an aircraft cockpit.

Given the users of executive dashboards are corporate executives, these tools are made to be extremely user friendly and simple. Executive dashboards often deliver the information in graphical format and has the capability to pull up more information in a particular area. For example, an executive at an online retailer might be viewing his/her executive dashboard that summarizes how the company is doing. The executive sees that a particular type of inventory is stagnant even though a new marketing campaign was launched to promote the sales of that inventory. The executive sees that the inventory level is remaining high and drills into this are for more information. The executive can then determine if the marketing campaign was not successful and whether or not the company should lower prices to decrease their inventory.

Executive dashboards can help an organization's executive keep apprised of how the company is doing. Without such a tool, it is difficult to get an accurate sense of business performance.