The dashboard has been flexible in providing information about systems used to support online trading, he said. "It's been quick and adaptive," he said, pointing to one case where a view of a process was revamped to reveal other information in only a day -- far less time than it took in the past.

"We support 70 different business units and deal with 30 of them daily, and not all 30 are going to want a plain-vanilla dashboard view that I put out," the vice president said.

For some time, the company's internal developers have built dashboards to get comprehensive views of parts of the business, a process that can take months. "Dashboards are important to us to take that summary in a usable format, but creating them has been one of [our] biggest challenges," he said. "Now we have something with scalability and flexibility."

The financial services company executive said he was initially concerned about the cost of packaged systems, estimating the value of his firm's configuration of the HP dashboard tool at about $250,000.

However, he said, the packaged system was "far more cost-effective," taking only a month to set up. In comparison, it took six months to create dashboards internally.