Dashboards can unlock the value of decades of IT investments by linking your ERP, business intelligence and analysis tools to humans who can act on the information. But as the interface between systems and business decisions, dashboards have to accommodate human behavior to add value.
Consider a real-world marketing director in Dallas. He has no fewer than six dashboards to help him manage his performance. There's the CRM dashboard, the financial dashboard, the PR dashboard, the advertising dashboard and so on. Each comes with its own username and password, and to access some he needs to launch a separate application. None of them get his undivided attention, and some of them are rarely used. In the end, the constraints under which the human is operating define the return on the system investment.
Beyond the need to integrate dashboards to simplify their use, when we design dashboards we need to take into account human behavior to get the most out of the investment. After all, despite our individuality, there are some behaviors we all share.
Source: BPM Today, http://www.bpm-today.com