For too many organizations, IT is a black box. Projects and systems are so complex that few CIOs can predict a direct impact on the business, making it hard to win budget and resources even in prosperous times. And when the CIO can't get a clear picture of the real-time data that underlies critical applications, infrastructure, and projects, IT too often ends up reacting to issues after users and customers are having problems.

The answer is a CIO dashboard that gathers key performance indicators, or KPIs, into a central repository that, in a single window, identifies the performance of critical systems and projects in real time. In our discussions with companies of all sizes, such a unified view tops their wish lists. While vendors have been slow to introduce products to meet this demand, we're seeing movement, and it's time for IT to take a look.

On the software side, vendors including BMC, CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are melding business service management (BSM), business intelligence (BI), and project and portfolio management (PPM) tools into overall dashboards--more on these later. We expect significant product offerings in a year to 18 months. Yes, implementation and integration will be difficult, and customization is inevitable. But a CIO dashboard is one of those transformative projects that comes along only rarely and can make or break an IT organization.

If there's so much pent-up demand, why the lag in supply? In a word, complexity. The technical challenge of providing hooks into several vendors' reporting tools is huge, requiring SOAP or XML bridges. If your application infrastructure is homogeneous, you'll have an easier time; for example, an early offering, BMC's Dashboard, works well with BMC apps.

Still, there's plenty you can do now to ensure that when dashboard offerings capable of consolidating a diverse range of data come online, your company is poised to take advantage.

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