The first time I saw a corporate dashboard on a big LCD screen, back in 2010, it displayed the number of daily unique visitors of a website plus the guest WIFI password.
Things have changed so much in 5 years.
Today’s dashboards draw on a vast array of business information tools: customer relationship management, website analytics, social media monitoring, code repository, server monitoring, shared drives and more. In fact, any available business-related data can be pulled in and displayed via dashboard. Most applications have an Application Programming Interfaces (API) available for this very purpose which makes integration with most common types of business software possible.
In June of this year, KlipFolio hosted “Dashboardpalooza” and they invited Ottawa’s startup community to join. We were honoured to attend the event and we were blown away by their convincing use of corporate dashboards. They had deployed one highly dynamic and relevant dashboard for each company department (sales, support, devops, R&D, etc.)
If someone were to ask you for the exact financial, sales, SEO, server uptime, development productivity and media coverage status of your company at this very moment in time, would you be able to provide accurate figures in real time?
At MediaMiser, we’ve elaborated our API with reporting capability in mind, to provide instant snapshots of media interactions volume, sentiment trend, author and publication coverage and regional information. Inside a dashboard, these PR Key Performance Indicators (KPI) provide:
Greater visibility: Having key information available from a single screen allows company executives to get an overview of how the business is performing at any point in time—making it easy to get a clear picture of how each area of a business is performing and to spot areas that require attention.
Time saving: The alternative to an executive dashboard involves reports being produced by key personnel and also executives having to sift through a vast amount of information to pick out relevant points. Having an executive dashboard eliminates the need for these tasks and allows for real-time reporting whenever needed.
Trend-spotting: Having information from so many areas of the business allows company executives to spot trends as well as areas that can be improved.
To find out more about MediaMiser’s API or our unique approach to media monitoring and analysis, contact one of our Media Analysis Experts.
David Nadeau is MediaMiser’s Chief Technology Officer and founder of InfoGlutton, an online reputation monitoring application. Follow him on Twitter: @pythonner
