Types of dashboards

 Often, businesses will tailor a dashboard for a specific purpose. The three most common categories are:

1. Strategic: Focuses on long term goals and strategies at the highest level of metrics
2. Operational: Short-term performance tracking and intermediate goals
3. Analytical: Consists of the datasets and the mathematics used in these sets

Let’s go into more detail about these three kinds of dashboards.

Strategic dashboards

 A wide range of businesses use strategic dashboards when evaluating and aligning their strategic goals. These dashboards provide information over the longest time frame — from a single financial quarter to years. They typically contain information that is useful for enterprise-wide decision-making. An example of such a dashboard is below, which focuses on key performance indicators (KPIs) over a year.

Operational dashboards

Operational dashboards are, arguably, the most common type of dashboard. Because these dashboards contain information on a time scale of days, weeks, or months, they can provide performance insight almost in real-time. This allows businesses to track and maintain their immediate operational processes in light of their strategic goals. The operational dashboard below focuses on customer service.

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Analytical dashboards

Analytical dashboards contain the details involved in the usage, analysis, and predictions made by data scientists. Certainly the most technical category, analytic dashboards are usually created and maintained by data science teams and rarely shared with upper management as they can be very difficult to understand.