Dashboards are tools used in strategic management in support of strategic planning and monitoring thus simplifying management and operational decision-making, all in harmony with the entire enterprise’s objectives.
The applications allow people to create and monitor scorecards or strategic maps representing sets of interconnected indicators and tasks based on a process methodology. Typically it is the well-known methodology of Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecards (BSC), which describes the performance of an organization as viewed from four key perspectives: Financial, Customer, Learning & Growth and Internal Business Processes, where a set of indicators to be monitored is defined for each field. Apart from sophisticated strategic maps based on the methodologies (BSC, Six Sigma, TQM,…), these tools support the creation of executive dashboards (cockpits) which summarize and display key data necessary for the decisions of managers and individual workers.
Tools for making dashboards and monitoring KPIs (key performance indicators) are found in Business Intelligence (BI) suites, such as Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, SAP Business Objects Enterprise or IBM Cognos Business Intelligence. If these tools are to be used in CPM, they have to be extended with the above-mentioned methodologies and ready-made sets of KPIs.
The sphere of strategic management comprises initiative management which employs tools similar to those used in project management. The applications enable the company to record, order, prioritize and monitor the execution of initiatives (strategic activities) within an organization in the context of the company’s strategic goals.
