Dashboards for supporting organizational development: principles for the design and development of public sector performance dashboards

Abstract

Dashboards can be used as an instrument to consolidate and integrate a wide range of data about organizational performance into a comprehensive single visual display to monitor and improve performance. Dashboards can play a vital role in performance measurement and improvement. Dashboards are rarely used in the public sector. The objective of this paper is to derive principles for the design and development of dashboards. The design principles include (1) customizing metrics, (2) use of existing data resources for selecting metrics, (3) linking performance metrics to the overall processes and procedures, (4) analyzing the effects of alternative improvement options, (5) visual communication at a glance for monitoring, analyzing, and assessing performance, (6) integrating several small dashboards into one dashboards, (7) data interpretation support and (8) learning and growth. We evaluated the principles using a case study. The evaluation showed that the effectively of dashboards is largely dependent on the implementation decisions made. Incorporating a wide range of views to account for the diversity in public values is essential for success. We recommend conducting more research into the use of dashboards for public sector improvement. In particular the use of dashboards for engaging the civic society.