I work in an industrial manufacturing plant. My Manager is always going on about dashboards almost every week I hear something like "I'd love to see this on a d

I work in an industrial manufacturing plant. My Manager is always going on about dashboards almost every week I hear something like "I'd love to see this on a dashboard" (usually referring to something on an existing printed report). He has been saying this for years and no usable dashboards have ever materialized. I think the biggest issue is no one in our organisation has a clear idea what a 'dashboard' is exactly and how people are supposed to use them. For some people a dashboard is a static page that gets refreshed periodically. I.E. "Lets show the current line speed in big bold 48pt font size and auto-refresh the webpage every 15 seconds." For other people a dashboard is something interactive (drill down, selectively trend values, modify trend scales on the fly etc). So there has always been this tension between the two use cases and we always end up with these halfhearted things (usually built using some BI package like COGNOS) which are the worst of both worlds. At the same time a dashboard has never really been in high demand. So I think people like my manager have really failed to articulate the value a dashboard would supply. The most promising thing I have seen recently is "Coresight" by OSISOFT (we use their PI plant historian system pretty extensively). They gave a demo that integrated control system type information (Conveyor status's, Flow meter readings, Tank levels etc) with location derived GIS data to show realtime updating maps etc which I thought was pretty cool.