Of course, we management consultants have learned to capitalize on this area One area where we address this issue is in business intelligence, which helps business provide the right information to the right people. I'd like to build upon Tyler’s solutions based upon my own experiences in this realm.

Dashboards are wonderful as long as the right metrics are displayed (very critical). How do you determine the right metrics? Start from the top — your business's strategy. Focus on what’s most important to the business. Know your audience and then ask “What behavior do I encourage by displaying this metric?” and “Will that behavior help the business meet our strategic goals?” By aligning metrics with your business’s strategy, you’ll minimize the changes to the dashboards. Unless your strategy changes dramatically, your dashboards should maintain consistency.
Tyler – your closing thoughts are great. As small businesses grow into mid-size and, ultimately big businesses, it’s imperative to maintain a culture where employees and managers think for themselves and use the data as input to the decision-making process. If managers/employees rely solely upon the data for their decisions, they’ll become disconnected from the human ability to be creative and find innovative solutions and a constantly-changing marketplace. They may also end up focusing on the wrong data/metric/incentive…and then end up hiring a management consultant to get them back on course