Microsoft Business Intelligence dashboards consolidate information from a variety of sources into a single, easy-to-use interface, and present the information in context, where people need it most.  Dashboards can contain any type of information needed for your business, including contacts, calendars and messages.

Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions give employees the power to create timely, ad-hoc reports that deliver answers to critical business questions.  

On a regular basis, organisations establish and refine company-wide goals.  Company-wide goals are usually broken down into departmental goals.  Departmental goals are then analysed and key performance indicators (KPIs) are established.  KPIs are quantifiable measurements of the key success factors for an organisation.   A SharePoint Dashboard is a tool that helps organisations track and share measurements of KPIs to determine whether or not they are on-target to achieve department goals.  If departmental goals are on-target, then company-wide goal they are aligned with are likely to also be on-target.

SharePoint dashboards often tap into the data stored in other systems.  A SharePoint Dashboard is not supposed to replace these systems, but instead provide summary level information about the data stored in these systems.  Examples of these systems include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, as well as data tracked by web services, such as the social networking features in SharePoint 2010.

A SharePoint dashboard can also tap into data stored within SharePoint.  This includes Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), SharePoint 2010, and SharePoint Foundation.  It is common to create a SharePoint Dashboard that tracks data stored in SharePoint lists and SharePoint document libraries.  Within lists and document libraries, a view is created that organises the information contained within a list or library in such a way that one can measure whether or not the KPI is on-target.  The SharePoint Dashboard taps into these views to provide a graphical view of the KPI over time so that senior management can easily determine whether or not the KPI is healthy or not.

When planning a SharePoint Dashboard, it is important to keep in mind that it is possible to have too many KPIs.  For any given department, a good rule of thumb is to identify 3-5 KPIs that will help a department determine whether or not their part of the business is healthy.  Too many KPIs can cause a group of people to lose focus, which can be counterproductive.  The key advantage of a SharePoint Dashboard is that it can be automated to collect relevant, summary data on a regular basis over time.