Only until an enterprise dashboard provides answers to a leader's actual questions—such as, "Are we on target this quarter?"—can it be considered valuable. Which accounts are vulnerable? Where is cost rising faster than revenue?

To do that, it needs three things. First, connected data. Instead of using manually updated spreadsheets, sales, finance, and operations data should originate from the source systems, such ERP or CRM. Secondly, a few metrics. Fifty charts that no one reads are outperformed by ten well selected indicators. Context comes in third. The owner, the trend, and the reason behind the movement should all be indicated by a number.