Institutional Dashboards: Navigational Tool for Colleges and Universities. Professional File. Number 123, Winter 2012.

Supporting quality data and decisions for higher education. In an age in which information and data are more readily available than ever, it is critical for higher education institutions to develop tools that can communicate essential information to those who make decisions in an easy-to-understand format. One of the tools available for this purpose is a dashboard, a one-to two-page document that presents critical information (indicators) in a succinct, visually appealing format. Just as an automobile dashboard with it its speedometer, odometer, tachometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, engine warning, and myriad other indicators, is designed to help the driver navigate the highway, an institutional dashboard is a tool designed to help management guide an organization. Or, as Doerfel and Ruben (2002) put it, a dashboard can be seen as a set of indicators that " reflect key elements of [an organization's] mission, vision, and strategic direction…[that can be used] to monitor and navigate the organization in much the same way a pilot and flight crew use the array of indicators in the cockpit to monitor and navigate an airplane " (p. 18). Regardless of the analogy employed, at a basic level a college or university's institutional dashboard is a management tool that succinctly informs its viewers of the current state of affairs, provides information with which the