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. "But 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 US$250,000. However, he said, the packaged system was "far more cost-effective," taking only a month to set up, compared with the six-month efforts to create dashboards internally.

A dashboard can be used to offer a real-time view into critical business and IT services, said Emmett. For example, an e-mail service might handle several business units and servers in many locations, all of which could be depicted in the dashboard.

The idea of having all that information under a "single pane of glass" is not commonplace now, said Jean-Pierre Garbani, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

It's especially difficult to integrate different types of information from different sources and products, he said.