Forrester Research estimates that companies could reduce IT budgets by as much as 30 percent with integrated management dashboards that link critical data from infrastructure monitoring software, application portfolio management, and professional management tools. Dashboards allow an IT executive to quickly assess the effects of related events and to take corrective actions. Doing so can make staff more productive and keep key systems up and running as they should run. For instance, a CIO in the automotive systems industry is among IT users migrating from static, in-house developed dashboards to an automated super-dashboard that is expected to assist the department in changing its service delivery approach in a way that better supports the business. The department formerly concentrated mostly on network metrics, but now tracks more financial indicators and still wants to measure customer satisfaction with important projects and improve help desk response time and problem resolution. However, executives should not become too dependent on dashboards, says an IT VP who monitors multiple special-purpose dashboards that track help desk statistics, system availability, project portfolios, and service level agreements (SLAs). The IT VP says understanding the data in back of the dashboard and how often it is refreshed, can help ensure executives dont react to quickly to what may be negative results in the dashboard and wreak havoc on IT processes or technologies.