Written by Michael Taylor, Mechanical engineer and project manager at NIST MEP.

I think dashboard is an overused, ill-defined word in many enterprises. As I was trying to create visibility into the success and challenges in our operations, I decided that I needed a dashboard (see blog on data). It sounds very simple. Everybody uses dashboards in business these days. Then I started to think about the origin of the dashboard and how that might help me create my own.