Dashboard Spy readers know my passion for dashboards and their growing role in presenting corporate metrics and KPIs. After all, I’ve collected and blogged about over a thousand dashboard examples. I truly believe that the dashboard is the new face of business intelligence. Their ease of use and user-centered design really makes information digestible and actionable.
Dashboards are rapidly becoming ubiquitous throughout the enterprise.
However, even I will admit that there are some places we should not take dashboard technology, no matter how strongly we want to promote the role of dashboards in business technology.
Startled by this claim? So, am I. Until a recent visit to one of the world’s top financial firms, I was convinced that dashboards should be distributed to every nook and cranny of the enterprise. There shouldn’t be a single spot in the building that employees can’t check on their metrics, right?
Well, let’s start off with this snapshot I took. It starts off innocently enough. I spotted this clever physical, real-world dashboard in the hallway near the break room. It’s a collection of sheets summarizing the performance of various business units. The pages are set into plastic containers so that you help yourself to a report of interest to you:

Not so strange. Kind of nice actually. As you walk by, you can grab a page to view the metrics you are interested in. As you see, there are 2 spots that contained content more popular than the rest. That’s interesting feedback.
Turns out, however, that this isn’t the only place one finds these dashboards. Take a look at these photos:

