The main reason BI has become so successful is because of the emergence of dashboards and dashboards.

These tools assimilate large volumes of information and transmit it in an intuitive format, which facilitates the classification and response to critical and urgent events. They also help you explore issues and trends without getting completely lost in huge data or reports.

If dashboards are assumed to be balanced, are dashboards innately unbalanced? What is the difference between dashboards and dashboards?

The popular concept seems to be that there is no difference. The terms are used interchangeably in most marketing warranties and performance articles. Perhaps there should be a distinction, as a scorecard for a college semester feels like you’re tackling a different problem than a car dashboard.

An example would make this distinction much easier. Think of a manager who is responsible for the customer service function in a large company.

Dashboard: indicators

• Troubleshooting time: medium
• Troubleshooting time: medium
• Percentage of problems solved in the first contact
• Percentage of problems solved in a given period of time
• Average result of the follow-up satisfaction survey

These measures are analyzed over a period of time (monthly or quarterly), based on specific objectives, either in absolute terms or improvements compared to a previous period.

Dashboard – Indicators

• Number of incoming calls in queue
• Number of calls in escalation
• Current wait time for incoming calls
• Current wait time for escalations
• Current CSRs online
• Average call resolution time
• Expected waiting time in two hours

All measurements, except the average call resolution time, will be displayed at the exact moment the panel is viewed or updated.

Based on this simple example, certain distinctions can be discerned:

• The scorecard can access the quality of execution, while the scorecards provide tactical guidance
• Dashboards are inherently measured against objectives. Dashboards do not need

Combining scorecards and balanced scorecards

Customer Relations Dashboards use many metrics that give you data on how your team is operating, but provide little information on progress toward your goal of reaching maximum resolutions. It is to measure / monitor, but not to manage. Similarly, customer relationship dashboards present a quick snapshot of the strategy you need to focus on to improve customer satisfaction, but they lack details on why you are struggling to get maximum resolutions.

However, there are ways to ensure that your dashboards include critical connections to strategy. Once you’ve identified the problematic metric on the dashboard, you can drill down to the maximum resolution dashboard that contained detailed metrics such as mean call resolution time, call queues, and wait time.