Executives need dashboards because they need quick  access and real-time status of mission-critical operational information.   Access to dashboard is vital to executives for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost is communication and awareness.   Executives need to prioritize; while avoiding the bad habit of looking over the shoulders of operations, they do need to be aware.  If an executive is going to ask for additional operations budget, it might be wise not to ask during the worst outage they ever experienced (this has actually happened before).  The awareness of what’s going on with the technology infrastructure, and not being blind-sided, is key to “staying sane”.  Executives want to look at their custom dashboards every morning before their meetings start, before going to lunch, and before going home, much the same way they are keeping up with email.

So what needs to be on the “perfect executive dashboard”?

• Mission critical business metrics are a must (transactions, service availability, etc).
• General availability statistics they can boast (or worry) about (core network availability, voice quality, application availability – Monthly and YTD) are also needed.
• Operational metrics are often required as well: stuff like MTTRs and # of services/customers down.

These KPIs are different for every organization, but the common thread here is that they are performance-based and non-technical.  To me, it boils down to a quote I consistently hear from executives:  “who cares about routers and switches, tell me about customers and services!”

The last part of the “perfect executive dashboard” is how it’s delivered and accessed.    First: signed clients are out, as they are too complex and time consuming – they will never be used.  The right answer is web-based, without plugins and extra configuration.  If IT doesn’t make their system “compatible” it will never be used, so that leaves plugin-free/ajax/pure HTML dashboards.

Executive dashboards are going to become more and more popular, until it reaches a point where they will become a requirement of operations to provide to the executive team.

I invite you take a look at our dashboard web page. There you will find some excellent screen captures that show the power of Monolith’s dashboards.

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network management, network monitoring, IT dashboards, executive dashboards, MTTR, application availability