Building the Executive Dashboard

Executive dashboards are systems that provide business intelligence to company executives and managers by presenting data from a wide variety of sources in ways that support effective monitoring and decision making. They are linked to a company’s data warehouses or other sources of data from operations, finance, marketing, and other domains and thus must provide visualizations that allow users to comprehend what can be an enormous quantity of data. In order to do so, the designer must consider many of the formats that have been identified in human factors practice to support various kinds of data and tasks. Many executive dashboards include capabilities to aggregate data from multiple sources, drill down to examine specific data, analyze historical or conceptual trends, and other functionality. These added capabilities add a significant amount of complexity to the design that must be addressed carefully. Users are often experts in their domains (ie. marketing) but not necessarily proficient with information technology or data analysis. The design must satisfy the needs of the users while providing a simple and context-dependent interface in order to be effective. This paper describes many of the human factors issues involved in creating executive dashboard systems and suggests some areas for hture research.