The dashboard is showing green but your customers are seeing red. What is going on? Dashboards are translating data and we need a way to test that the translation is accurate. Far too often we are lulled into a false sense of security by data which is overly precise as in the following example. Bluey: “My quartz watch is fantastically precise. Right now it shows its 18.389 seconds past 11am”. Big Red: “Yes Bluey. Its very precise, but not very accurate. My sundial has it at mid afternoon. I think your watch has stopped.” Obviously Bluey’s might have noticed something was amiss when the numbers never changed but strangely it didn’t happen. In the world of dashboarding this is unfortunately rather common. If you precision instrument is giving a result that’s wildly different from reality you need get back to the basics and check the information flows. Dashboards are incredibly useful management tools when they provide an accurate summary of what is happening in the real world they are monitoring but like any tool they require routine maintenance and a way of sanity checking if what you are measuring reflects reality. 2009-01-24T04:42:00Z The Naked Truth about Dashboards 5 The dashboard is showing green but your customers are seeing red. What is going on? 2009-02-25T22:37:06Z