Dashboard (business)

In business computer information systems, a dashboard is a type of graphical user interface which often provides at-a-glance views of key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to a particular objective or business process. In other usage, "dashboard" is another name for "progress report" or "report" and considered a form of data visualization. In providing this overview, business owners can save time and improve their decision making by utilizing dashboards. The “dashboard” is often accessible by a web browser and is usually linked to regularly updating data sources. Well known dashboards include Google Analytics dashboards, used on 55% of all websites, which show activity on a website; such as visits, entry pages, bounce rate and traffic sources. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 brought other dashboards to the fore, with the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker and the UK government coronavirus tracker being good examples. The term dashboard originates from the automobile dashboard where drivers monitor the major functions at a glance via the instrument panel. The idea of digital dashboards followed the study of decision support systems in the 1970s. Early predecessors of the modern business dashboard were first developed in the 1980s in the form of Executive Information Systems (EISs). Due to problems primarily with data refreshing and handling, it was soon realized that the approach wasn't practical as information was often incomplete, unreliable, and spread across too many disparate sources. Thus, EISs hibernated until the 1990s when the information age quickened pace and data warehousing, and online analytical processing (OLAP) allowed dashboards to function adequately. Despite the availability of enabling technologies, the dashboard use didn't become popular until later in that decade, with the rise of key performance indicators (KPIs), and the introduction of Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton's balanced scorecard. In the late 1990s, Microsoft promoted a concept known as the Digital Nervous System and "digital dashboards" were described as being one leg of that concept.