Strategic Dashboards: The Essential

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Dashboards have become indispensable tools in the arsenal of modern companies, providing quick and actionable insights from large volumes of data. Since their emergence, when they were tools recommended only for senior management, until the present day, dashboards have evolved to meet different needs and audiences. So much so that, today, it is common to talk about different types of data panels, with specific purposes. Because of this, two issues ago I wrote about how data dashboards can be classified according to their function: strategic, analytical, operational, and tactical.

Strategic dashboards differ from others because they are directly associated with some company strategy, be it pricing (commercial) strategy, positioning strategy, purchasing and supply chain strategy, or customer retention strategy, among many other possibilities. Therefore, contrary to what some think, Strategic Dashboards are not necessarily data panels exclusive to senior management — ​​but rather are products whose main focus is on visualizing KPIs critical to the organization’s long-term success. They are used when it is necessary to have a broad and aggregated view of the company’s performance in a given strategy, helping in decision-making. An appropriate analogy would be to compare strategic dashboards to the control panel of an airplane, where the pilot (decision maker) needs a comprehensive and integrated view of all parameters to ensure the safety and success of the flight (the strategy). For this reason, they are products often used by senior management.

The main objective of strategic dashboards is to provide a clear and concise view of the critical KPIs that impact the organization’s long-term success. They help monitor performance against the company’s strategic objectives, allowing leaders to track progress toward established goals, visualize progress, and identify areas that require intervention. It is common for these panels to present comparisons of partial and integrated results with goals, benchmarks, analysis of the composition of results between different segments of activity, and historical analysis to contextualize the performance of the strategy over time, among other analyses.

In this sense, strategic dashboards tend to present some specific characteristics that are not commonly found in other types of dashboards. Many of the indicators present in strategic dashboards incorporate predictive analysis so that decision-makers know in advance when it is necessary to change the strategy in progress, whether by making it more aggressive or changing it completely. Other resources that, in general, are also common to be found in these dashboards as they add a lot of value to decision-making are scenario analyses and direct communication channels with those responsible for achieving certain results and goals.

The target audience for strategic dashboards is mainly made up of decision-makers, including many executives and senior leaders, who tend to need an aggregated view of the performance of their area. These users require fast, actionable insights that support strategic decision-making, ensuring the company stays on track to achieve its long-term goals. For these reasons as well, this type of dashboard generally contains a limited number of indicators, focusing on the most critical KPIs to avoid overwhelming users with excessive information and, yet, allowing a clear and direct visualization of strategic performance, without unnecessary distractions.

Due to their complexity and importance, strategic dashboards are susceptible to several common design errors. Among the most frequent are:

• Excessive data, indicators, cohorts, and analyses: Attempt to include too much data, too many graphs, and too many filters to allow micromanagement. This type of error can lead to analysis paralysis or, even worse, confusion when analyzing data in such a way that wrong decisions are made. There is no point in presenting the customer with a bunch of numbers, without making sure that those numbers are important and that the user understands how to use the panel.

• Providing Inadequate Context for Data: Lack of comparison to benchmarks, targets, or histories. Data is raw information and therefore lacks context. For the strategic dashboard to be as actionable as it should be, it must carry possibilities for visualizing the context in a way that ensures that good decisions are made.

• Choosing inappropriate metrics and indicators: Using KPIs that do not truly reflect important performance for analyzing the strategy. You need to have indicators that are important to set your goal and objective. For example: when driving a car, the speedometer is the most important KPI, next to the fuel KPI. Knowing how long the song has been playing on the radio doesn’t matter and only serves to distract.

• Improper or Excessive Use of Colors: Make the dashboard visually confusing and difficult to interpret. The absence of colors does not help to verify which aspects of the strategy can be improved or what has worked. On the other hand, excessive colors also do not help, as they prevent relevant information from being highlighted quickly.

Note that the main design errors mentioned can, for the most part, be avoided by planning the panel before its construction and use. However, the planning mentioned here is not pure and simple planning for those who work with data visualization tools — but rather, planning that involves the area that will use the Dashboard. It is, therefore, a multidisciplinary planning that involves everything from interviews with the client (to identify their informational needs and how they carry out their analysis journey) to technical conversations with data engineers and data architects, to find out what data is available and as they should preferably be made available on the base. It is important to highlight this point given that Strategic Dashboards often come with additional demands to be in real-time, in almost real-time (updated every minute, for example), and with a large volume of indicators.

In the next article, we will explore operational dashboards in more detail. Until then, tell us: what type of Strategic Dashboard layout impressed you the most? Tell us a little more about it.