In our travels to meetings & conferences, something we hear a lot is “That sounds great! Can you send me your dashboard?” Now… I don’t want to minimize the awesomeness of a well-structured and accurate dashboard. They’re easy to understand, they’re attention-grabbing, and they’re concise. But they’re not really why you’re digging into your data. I want to talk about what dashboards are good for, and what that means for the kind of data problems you’re probably trying to solve. What Dashboards are Good At Dashboards reflecting cross-system data within your organization do two important things. They call attention to outliers and they support research into what’s really going on. Think about the metaphor of the dashboard: a car’s instrument panel. My car has 36 sources of information on its dashboard. Only 4 of them are gauges that provide me with real-time data on my car’s operation. I really only…