How do you ensure that your dashboards and reports focus on business outcomes rather than just technical metrics?

With new leadership in IT and at the executive level, our reporting needs have shifted to become more business-focused. We're still evolving, but we've categorized our dashboards into operational, project, digital transformation, and budget-focused areas. The budget dashboard is particularly popular with the business because it helps translate IT metrics into something they can understand. Over the past six months, we've been working closely with business stakeholders to gather feedback on what they want to see. This process is reshaping how we think about and present our metrics. While technical details are being minimized, it's crucial to still convey the story behind the metrics. It's about balancing technical information with business relevance and ensuring our message is clear.

We're still working on refining this aspect. While we have numerous technical dashboards, our goal is to translate these into business services that are easily understood by the business side. Gartner provides some guidance, but even those resources can still be perceived as too technical. Cybersecurity dashboards are an exception, as they align well with frameworks like NIST and CIS, which the board readily understands and is interested in. However, for other operational areas, finding the right balance is challenging. Feedback often indicates that our dashboards are either too high-level or too detailed. I'm exploring templates and resources from Gartner, but the perfect solution seems elusive and may vary by organization. Our current challenge is meeting the detailed needs of our accounts without overwhelming them.