Organizational Dashboards: Steering an Organization Towards its Mission

ABSTRACT

This paper describes and demonstrates an organizational dashboard. An organizational dashboard is a tool used by management to clarify and assign accountability for the “critical few” key objectives, key indicators, and projects/tasks needed to steer an organization toward its mission statement. Dashboards are both strategic and tactical in nature. An organizational dashboard is just like an automotive dashboard; it keeps management's eyes on what is important to steering the organization. The intention of a dashboard is to promote management by process, not management by objective.

Keywords:

• Dashboard
• Balanced scorecard
• Mission
• Key objective
• Key indicator
• Project
• Task
• Case study.

Notes

¹The author was introduced to flag diagrams at Florida Power&Light Company by Dr. Noriaki Kano of the Science University of Tokyo, 1990.

²The author was introduced to the three types of projects by Dr. Noriaki Kano of the Science University of Tokyo, 1990.

³The questions in this section are paraphrased from Mizuno, p. 106.