Good article Stephen - our reporting system is dashboard based. Depending on what your role is in the event organization, you will see event information most relevant to that role. (ie a finance person can determine to see financials, an exhibit manager can see exhibit related stats.

Tony, I am excited to hear about Sherpa's dashboard reporting. Along with the other exciting features that Sherpa is launching, the Meetings Industry will have some exciting new tools to consider.

great post, thanks Stephen

As is often the case - it is not the technology that is lacking, it is the ability for organizations to properly organize themselves to best leverage it. Thanks.

Very interesting article. We, as probably many other event registration companies, found ourselves in possession of huge amount of useful and relevant data. The key challenge is to make this available in east-to-use and easy-to-understand form. Dashboard is one way to achieve this, but it only tends to give you a snapshot of current state, which might not be good representation of the event performance overall. I can see that within few years, companies like us will push the reporting technology even further and help organisers to achieve better understanding of something as complex as exhibition

>> it is not the technology that is lacking, it is the ability for organizations to properly organize themselves to best leverage it. It is almost like registration companies, who are predominantly database and technology experts, need to also become experts in the event marketing, so they can analyse the data and present results it in ready to use form

Levan, Let me challenge your definition of a Dashboard. A snapshot of the state of an organization should include both current and HISTORICAL information in order to provide comparisons that are key to the decision making process. One show organizer Hanley Wood has already developed a dashboard that does just this. Since it is a proprietary tool, I am waiting to see what tools will be available to the market. You have inspired another post to defining dashboards. Thanks.

I tripped across a website the other day that had a well thought out solution for Dashboards. Google “One Page Business Plan” and navigate to “solutions” to see for yourself. When used correctly, dashboards (or pace reports for events) should illustrate leading indicators for the business so that midcourse corrections can be made. They should enable you to drill down to see the details or at least be able to see the top 5 – 10 more recent wins/losses that impacted the latest results. When dashboards include a forecast element, they can even better point to where additional efforts may help deliver desired results. Besides having a dashboard that tracks a single event, the one pages business plan site above shows how their solutions tie the business plan to KPI's so that a business can be managed very proactively. A solution like this that is shared with leadership and staff helps drive accountability and continuous improvement up and down the business. This is powerful stuff for businesses that need to be both quick and good. Dave Lutz Velvet Chainsaw Consulting

To toss in another buzz word, we are speaking to enterprise level event management tools. These are management and reporting tools that reside in one application and report from one application for every event in the enterprise (even if it is 1 per year). We have been building these for a few years. Yes, finding clients with the vision to use these applications is difficult, as it takes a swing at their business processes. More importantly the industry needs to be educated on these types of solutions. I have never seen two of these applications that are exactly alike. The customization takes them out of the "registration" budget. These solutions are similar to big CRM builds; nothing out of the can really fits perfectly. Stephen, please keep up the work and help the industry catch up with the technology.

Bob: It doesn't surprise me to hear that Event Ready is ahead of the market by offering Dashboard management tools. Great comparison to the CRM tools - a dashboard view of customer is one of the home runs that salesforce.com was able to hit. Thanks for your input.