When no new funds are available for investing in new projects, cost down in one area(basic maintenance and operations, for example)can free up funds to apply to more customer-facing or business-driven goals. One investment to consider, according to a recent Aberdeen Group report, is dashboard technology. (You can read an executive summary of the report at Intelligent Enterprise.)

That’s because, the study found, companies that use dashboards achieve “drastically higher performance than their peers, writes study author Michael Lock, thanks to the increased visibility into the metrics that drive their businesses. These metrics are particularly important in a fluctuating economy.

How much of a difference do the dashboards make? Consider that dashboards are in use at more than half of Best-in-class? companies (in the case of performance-reporting dashboards, specifically, the usage among best-in-class companies is 77 percent). The report defines best-in-class performers as those that showed:

A 24% average year-over-year increase in operating profit, versus a 3% industry-average increase
An 8.3% average year-over-year improvement in customer service, versus an industry-average 2.3% improvement An 8.4% average year-over-year improvement in sales, compared with in industry-average 2.3% improvement. Because dashboards are among the most user-facing intelligence tools, the results of this survey confirm what companies have been realizing (and vendors have been proselytizing) over the past decade: That information-driven decisions produce the best results.

And that makes any cost down required to invest in enabling technologies more than worth the effort.

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