In the next few days the first beta testers will start using Geckoboard, a new realtime status board for businesses. In this post I'll briefly explain what a status board is and how it can benefit your business.
What is a Status Board?
A status board shows you useful information about your business in an easy to digest way. Most business have a bunch of different functions (sales, customer service, infrastructure management, product development etc), each function has information that's useful to keep an eye on. How close are we to our sales targets? What's our customer support backlog like? Are our servers up? It's all useful information and all pointers as to the overall health of your business.
The problem is that all this info is locked up in different applications making it difficult to get a handle on the overall state of play. While someone could go off and manually pull it all together and report it, it's a time consuming process and much of the information could be out of date by the time it's all collated. This is where a status board comes in.
The status board pulls in the information from wherever it sit, displays it in a way that's easy to read and refreshes it in a timely manner to ensure it's always up-to-date. Whether it's only used by a few people in the organisation or displayed on a large plasma for the whole office to see there are real benefits to having easy access to key business information. By shining a light on all aspects of your business you can begin to see where and when bottlenecks occur and spot problems before they turn into dramas.
All well and good, but up to now if you wanted a status board you would have had to build it yourself. For many companies that's a tricky proposition, a good status board can be expensive to build, in addition much of the data is siloed in external services over which you have no control so maintenance is an overhead also. That's why we built Geckoboard.com and in my next post I'm going to give you a guided tour and take you through some of the features of the Geckoboard status board. In the meantime, why not pop along to geckoboard.com and register for the beta? We'll be sending out the invites in the next few days.
What sort of information is important to your business? Share your thoughts in the comments.
PHOTO CREDIT: Life Sciences via Flickr | Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
