Most organisations have a dashboard. Far fewer have a dashboard anyone looks at after the week it was launched.
Built for the wrong audience
Dashboards are often built to be impressive rather than useful. They demonstrate effort. They rarely answer the one question the person in charge actually loses sleep over.
The single-decision test
Before building a report, I ask: which decision does this change, and who makes it? If I cannot name both, the report should not exist.
Governance follows attention
Where the numbers are watched, behaviour follows. This is why good governance is partly about choosing — deliberately and sparingly — what to measure.