Digital Dashboard

What it is, why it matters, and best practices. This guide provides examples and practical advice to help you create a best-in-class digital dashboard of your own.

A laptop and smartphone display various data visualizations and metrics, including maps and charts labeled with "Cost of Goods" and "Qlik." The background is a solid blue color.

What is a Digital Dashboard?

A digital dashboard is a business intelligence tool that allows business leaders to track, analyze and report on KPIs and metrics. Modern, interactive dashboards make it easy to combine data from multiple sources and deeply explore and analyze the data directly within the dashboard itself.

Digital Dashboard Benefits

Visualizing data by using modern dashboard software can immediately benefit your organization by helping you...

Turn data into business value
Most organizations have vast amounts of unorganized data. Digital dashboards help users hone in on the most important data points, and better leverage the data to improve their business decisions.

Rally key stakeholders
Digital dashboards can be highly-effective tools for supporting and strengthening your case with decision makers across the organization. In addition to helping you quickly respond to changing business needs, the clear visualizations can help you present more compelling arguments for landing executive approvals.

Move data literacy forward
Sharing dashboards of organized, trustworthy data will help to advance a data-driven culture throughout all levels of your business. When employees are able to explore data freely from a single location, users at all levels will be encouraged to make discoveries and innovate.

Screens showing dashboards with charts and graphs displaying sales data on the Qlik Sense platform.

Dashboard Demo Videos

See how to explore information and quickly gain insights.

  • Combine data from all your sources

  • Dig into visualizations and dashboards

  • Get AI-generated insights

How to Design Best-in-Class Dashboards - Image

How to Design Best-in-Class Dashboards

Download our ebook with 4 must-see dashboard examples.

Digital Dashboard Examples by Industry

Digital dashboards are indispensable tools for transforming your organization’s data into financial value, but there isn’t just one approach that works best for every business. To show you how targeted and versatile digital dashboards can be, we've gathered the following top-performing examples from specific industries.

Qlik Sense executive dashboard displaying MTD revenue, margin, sterling notional, average notional, and trade count with various performance graphs, including client segments, product margins, counterparty notional, and currency.

Financial Services

A custom dashboard for comparing revenue and margin data will help you identify your most profitable customers, spot ways to reduce operational costs, and find opportunities to transform your team's performance.

Explore Financial Services Dashboards
Bar charts and table displaying Tesla Supercharger overlap in a 158 km range for various locations, highlighting an average overlap of 37% and 33.8 chargers.

High Tech

Clear visualizations will help you gain visibility over your global supply chain, maximize profitability, accelerate innovation, and deliver far more agile operations.

Explore High Tech Dashboards
Qlik Sense dashboard displaying hospital readmission rates and penalties for various conditions. Total CMS 30-Day Readmission Penalties: $936,453. Features bar charts, scatter plots, and line graphs.

Healthcare

Healthcare digital dashboards allow you to quickly analyze important patient care KPIs to improve outcomes, discover operational inefficiencies, more effectively manage your workforce, and increase profitability.

Explore Healthcare Dashboards
Screenshot of an Operational Dashboard for a manufacturing plant operations

Manufacturing

A manufacturing dashboard lets you visualize the finest details of your plant operations, compare actuals against standards for your most important KPIs, and find unexpected supply-chain and operational efficiencies.

Explore Manufacturing Dashboards
A Qlik Sense KPI dashboard displaying metrics: Margin % (44%), Sales vs Budget % (113%), and TY vs LY Sales. Includes bar and line graphs, pie charts, and other visual data representations.

Retail

View your most important KPIs in one location. Leverage the data to analyze shopping patterns by channel, drive sales and shopper engagement, and maximize profit.

Explore Retail Dashboards
A Qlik Sense business dashboard showing total sales of $294,928, a gross margin of 15%, and metrics for net promoter score, overall satisfaction, and customer effort. A bar graph displays revenue by product.

Media & Telecom

Immediately view KPIs that help you navigate fluctuating markets, centralize your processes, and improve customer loyalty.

Explore Media and Telecom Dashboards
Qlik Sense dashboard screen showing various data visualizations including a tree map, dot chart, map, and table, related to prescriber profiles, call schedule, and metrics for a pharmaceutical sales team.

Life Sciences

Digital dashboards let you easily explore and combine your CRM data with market share data, letting you adapt quickly to change and target customers more effectively.

Explore Life Sciences Dashboards
A Qlik Sense data dashboard showing Sales Rep Performance with charts for Sales by Variance, Sales vs Margin, Sales Quantity by Sales Rep, Total Revenue, and Avg Lead Time vs Inventory.

Consumer Products

Analyze consumer trends in a single view to help you maximize sales, increase market share and consumer loyalty, and manage intelligent supply chains.

Explore Consumer Products Dashboards
A laptop screen displays a data visualization dashboard with a scatter plot, a chord diagram, and a data table on a teal background with subtle geometric shapes.

10 Ways to Take Your Visualizations to the Next Level

Inspire action with your data. Learn about the latest visualizations and how to choose the right ones to highlight the most important aspects of your data.

Best Practices for Digital Dashboards

Before you jump in to build your own digital dashboards, be sure to consider the following best practices so you can start off on the right foot.

Understand your data
Take the time to discover all the data that's available to you, the most important information you'll need to report on, and the types of decisions you want the data to inform.

Enable your team
Itemize the top goals for key stakeholders on your team, and use this knowledge to prep dashboards that help them take the most impactful actions.

Simplify your visuals
Digital dashboards are powerful tools, but including too many complex visualizations can hinder quick insights. Explore different designs until you have a dashboard that presents your stories in a clean, simple way. Get inspired by the ten best modern data visualization examples.

Free your users
Don't limit users to linear exploration — let people freely explore all connections within the data, so they can discover the full story for themselves.

Provide the right data for the right users
Guide users to better, faster insights by giving them access to the data that's most relevant to their individual roles.

Embed dashboards where decisions are made
Let your users explore their data wherever they make decisions — apps, business processes, portals and websites.

Blue graphic with upward arrows and the text "The BI & Analytics Survey 23".

BARC’s BI & Analytics Survey 23: Qlik Highlights

In BARC’s survey of real BI users, Qlik Sense ranked #1 in critical KPIs including Performance Satisfaction, Dashboards, and Project Length in its peer groups.

Key Capabilities of a Digital Dashboard

The most effective digital dashboards do so much more than just KPI tracking and data visualization. Here are a few key capabilities to consider as you find the right dashboard tool for you:

  • Fully interactive. Leverage robust analytics right from the dashboard itself to explore and evaluate your data.

  • All data sources, together. Easily combine and analyze data from across the organization.

  • Augmented Analytics (AI). Powerful AI will suggest specific analyses to perform, and insights to glean from your data.

  • Automated Alerts and Reporting. Set up your dashboard to auto-share with key stakeholders on a regular cadence, and to send alerts based on KPI fluctuations.

  • Built for Mobile. Dive into your dashboards from any device, with full touchscreen optimization and interactive functionality.

  • Simple Data Prep. A digital dashboard connected to a modern data analytics platform will help you to spend less time preparing data, and more time pinpointing ways to better manage your team.

Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms grid showing Qlik in the Leader quadrant.

A 14X Magic Quadrant Leader

See why Qlik is recognized again as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms.

See interactive dashboards in action