Dashboards are reporting tools that present visually in one place several key metrics and at a glance give a sense of the department’s performance against a goal. Legal department managers ought to think in terms of dashboards as that thinking disciplines them to consider, gather and analyze metrics that are insightful (See my post of Aug. 24, 2006: dashboard compared to balanced scorecard; April 13, 2007: KPIs and performance metrics compared to dashboards; Dec. 12, 2007: Pfizer and Business Objects for its dashboard; April 27, 2008: Kraft and a litigation hold dashboard; Dec. 9, 2005: data visualization software for dashboards; and March 29, 2009: Celirity’s Access dashboard.).
Dashboard software translates metrics into dials, pie charts or other and immediately informative – graphics. Closely allied to the topic of dashboards are my posts on balanced scorecards and data visualization (See my post of Feb. 26, 2008: balanced scorecards with 8 references; and May 7, 2008: methods to portray data with 9 references; 22 cited in one.).