Last year at Dreamforce there was a great session called Manage What You Measure: Lessons from the Dashboard Pros. I bring this up because one of the best ways to drive Salesforce adoption and overall CRM success is to develop a plan around dashboards. I know, I'm preaching to the choir here, but to help those of you just getting started with dashboards and reports or finally thinking about a performance management initiative, here are some resources and suggestions that should help:

• Wayne Eckerson at the Data Warehouse Institute has a written a book on performance dashboards and conducted some very useful research on the topic. Both are worth reviewing. For example, do you know the difference between a dashboard and a scorecard?
• Once you've developed a plan, it's typically recommended that you "think big and start small." What are your most pressing needs? Sales Analytics? Marketing Analytics? Service and Support? More often than not organizations want to start with Executive Dashboards. Whatever the case may be, put a plan in place and check out some of the Dreamforce '06 presentations to learn from the experiences of other Salesforce customers.
• Once your priorities are clear, you're going to need to learn the Salesforce Dashboard Mechanics.Watch this 20 minute Breeze presentation to get familiar with some of the basics.
• To save you considerable time and to jumpstart your project, be sure to download some of the free dashboards on the AppExchange (4 of the Top 10 downloads are dashboards!).
• Be sure to learn about the new Winter '07 dashboard features.
• Depending on the complexity of your implementation and your overall objectives, you might want to consider Salesforce professional services or one of our consulting partners. Engaging with services early and not waiting for analytics to become important (because they will be) is critical.

Once you've reviewed the above information and have clear short, medium, and long term dashboard and performance management goals, be sure to do some research on the advanced features that our best-of-breed AppExchange Analytics partners can deliver. On-demand business intelligence is now getting a lot of industry attention and we have some great partners developing analytics solutions on the Apex Platform.

What are some dashboard resources you have found useful? Got some best-practices to share? Post your advice and feedback here and don't forget to also visit the IdeaExchange to help shape our reporting and dashboard product direction and platform strategy.