Beautiful dashboard, but what's going on behind the bells and whistles?

It must be something to do with my reading habits, but LinkedIn shows me countless impressive looking dashboards - more than I can take in.

Many are beautiful works of art, but what do they tell their users?

The problem with many dashboards is that they do a beautiful job of presenting the available data. That's fantastic, but how much thought has gone into what data should be presented.

It's easy for these things start from the wrong place and maybe that's because its quite a technical thing to create, so they are created by technical people to demonstrate their technical skills.

I may be deluged with complaints from dashboard wizards about that last comment - but before you do, read on and let's see.

Before I end my moan about my LinkedIn feed by the way, the other thing I see is a lot of 'cheat sheets' with "100 (or even a thousand) KPIs every CFO should know"

A KPI, as you know full well, is a KEY Performance Indicator. These are supposed to represent the measures that inform the most important decisions being made in your business. So you should focus on the most important few!

The whole process should start with what strategic and operational decisions have the biggest impact on your business and what you can measure that provide LEADING indicators for those - ie they tell you whether you are meeting objectives that there is still time to influence.

This may require some new thinking. Revenue is important, and often features in KPI's - but by the time you have reported revenue, it's far too late to influence anything other than cash collection.

Track the measures that you can influence, such as number of sales calls - either outbound calls that you are in control of, or inbound calls where a drop means you need to do more lead generation.

The reason these indicators might not often make it into the dashboard is because they aren't routinely collected by many finance systems. So as always, you need to start with strategy, determine the important objectives, seek out indicators that actually measure progress towards those objectives and find a way to capture them.

Then you can hand them over to you dashboard wizard to make a beautiful representation of these in a way that the people who will be held accountable for them can influence them.

There's nothing wrong with a beautiful dashboard, as long as it is more than just a work of art.