Who Needs an Executive Dashboard?

First, allow me to say that I think the Executive Dashboard is misnamed. It should be named the Everyone Dashboard, or at least the Analyst and Manager Dashboard. Because those are the people who are sent digging in the corporate archives for the history of the company's performance.

One of the biggest values of a dashboard isn't the end-user interface (what you and I see) itself, with all its snazzy graphics and the latest bells-and-whistles marketed by your particular BI vendor, but the underlying store of information that supports it. Most companies do not have anywhere they keep summary level data for posterity's sake, unless it's financial data. How many sales did we have last month v. the same month last year? How many customers dropped off? The best possible scenario is to have this data available, along with key supporting information, such as the ability to drill down to a greater degree of detail, historical information that could impact results (for example: there were 5 Mondays in this month and Mondays are our biggest sales day) and metadata that explains where the data came from and what calculations were applied to it.

For the forecaster, this information is invaluable. Forecasting is a formidable responsibility. You get it wrong and people lose their jobs, either because the company overstaffed based on bad information or because the forecaster put up a goal that the company couldn't achieve and Wall Street is very unforgiving of this kind of mistake. But a forecaster is only as good as her information and one of the key pieces of information is historical data. This historical data must be given some context with which to interpret it in order to be useful. Otherwise it's like trying to speak that Inuit language that only one living person knew, but she died and the knowledge went with her.