Ask HN: How to Build a Dashboard for your business

I sometimes see in articles about Square or Facebook the mention of a custom dashboard usually presented on some big flatscreen in a common area of company-specific metrics. Like for square it might be a live transaction count, along with a daily and cummulative dollars processed (for example), among other things.

My question for HN - how many of your companies, either startups, your own thing, or established firms have these kind of dashboards, and:

1) How transparent is it? Is it in a common area where all your employees can see it? And if so, do you hide some things or does the cleaning lady see everything the CEO sees?

2) Do you have any advice or best practices for creating such dashboards? What technology did you use to hack it together, or is it a collection of third party tools you are some how parsing, like Google Analytics and Flurry, etc.

I'm in a big old company, and I'd like to establish a dashboard for us that's transparent and covers our website and app performance. I'd like this data to help us be better at carving out strategy and promote ideas from all employees. I feel like things are so siloed and mysterious.

I'll take any advice I can get. Cheers.