Definition of Executive Dashboard Products

The concept of gaining greater insight into a business through understanding data is not new, in fact it's been around for quite some time. Placing this information on a "dashboard", a collection of charts, reports and graphs, to provide executives with an easy to use, easy to interact with means of accessing this data is at the core of executive dashboard products that are available from a number of vendors and that have become increasingly popular over the past ten years. While executive dashboard products have traditionally been the sole discretion of enterprise organization due to cost, new developments in the executive dashboard products market are bringing a new slate of technologies and solutions to mid-sized organizations.

Origins of Executive Dashboard Products

While executive dashboards are not new, executive dashboard products have been heavily placed in enterprise organizations only over the past decade or so. Companies like Cognos and Buisness Objects have been successful at placing their executive dashboard products at the core of decision-making systems within large enterprise organizations. Through the course of the decade, as the amount of data captured an stored by companies has grown at a staggering pace, executive dashboard products have become increasingly interesting propositions for smaller organizations. Until today the biggest challenge for executive dashboard products has been cost - cost of purchase, cost of implementation and cost of ongoing operation.

Benefits of Executive Dashboard Products

The reason for the success of executive dashboard products can be summarized by the statement "decision support system." The executive dashboard products currently available are ideal systems to provide executives with tools to understand how their organizations is performing and to measure that performance against pre-determined standards. A sales organization, for example, can not only use executive dashboard products to measure sales performance against targets, but to also measure other key metrics like average margin by sales rep; The executive dashboard products are making it possible for companies to gain greater degrees of understanding based on available data to ultimately make better decisions.

Sources of Executive Dashboard Products

Finding executive dashboard products is not difficult. There are many companies offering executive dashboard products ranging from established, well known players like Cognos and Business Objects, to more recent executive dashboard products from companies like EMANIO. The executive dashboard product that is right for a specific organization will most often be determined by a lot more factors than just price. As executive dashboard products evolve they are giving organizations of varying sizes the ability to benefit from the value of executive dashboard products.

Comparing Executive Dashboard Products

Through the process of purchasing executive dashboard products at some stage the issue of product comparison will arise. The key to comparing executive dashboard products is not to be locked into a pure feature for feature comparison or analysis of who has more features or which company has been doing it the longest. Any executive dashboard products comparison should first and foremost take into account the specific needs of the buyers. What feature sets are need from executive dashboard products that the organization will benefit from? With this ammunition in hand executive dashboard products can be properly compared.