A marketing dashboard is a collection of critical metrics organized by logical family which provide diagnostic and predictive insights to measure performance and support resource allocation.

Okay, pretty good definition, but I would challenge the predictive nature of a dashboard. I would much prefer the word suggestive. I have yet to see a dashboard metric that was futuristic. They're more or less latent measurements or current status reads...not predictive.

The other main question I have is the critical metrics notion. Who says what those are? Are they relative to the organization or are there a few that are common across industries or companies?

-- David Kinard