Let me begin the dashboard journey. Dashboards were once reporting tools, developed and designed to visualize KPIs and track specific projects or initiatives. I would say that in my organization, as well as most businesses, they played the same role. They were existing and crucial as well, but weren’t mission-critical.
The agile era and digital transformation era followed, marked by increased complexity and velocity of indicators. Even the leadership would like to have live and flexible visibility into their requirements. This is where simple data presentation in visualization (such as the graphs and friendly UX in a static dashboard) isn’t enough.
We need something that can work with our intelligence, something very dynamic and flexible. Leadership doesn’t just want to use it for reporting and monitoring; they want to take one step ahead with data-driven decision making, forecasting, risk and conflict detection and management, and transparency. This is where dashboards have taken many shapes, names and use cases, including operational dashboards, Scrum boards, strategic dashboards, real-time dashboards, tactical dashboards and analytical dashboards.
