Does your dashboard make you feel like you had too much caffeine? Just as car dashboards have gone from the exquisite simplicity of the original Volkswagen Beetle's speedometer, odometer and fuel gauge to current awe-inspiring displays of global positioning systems, iPod docking stations, scrolling message boards and voice recognition, so too have corporate performance dashboards moved beyond a few basics of delayed cash flow information.

Today's financial dashboards represent a real-time bonanza of constantly updating and recalculating data feeds that, if not well conceived, can literally drive an executive to distraction, according to technology experts.

It's a little like what could happen to your stock portfolio if you watch too much of CNBC's Squawk Box: After hearing hour after hour of reports about corporate hiccups and home runs, any investor has to wonder why he or she isn't out there trading right that minute. In other words, too many dashboard alerts can make an executive act prematurely based on an aberration rather than a trend. "A big issue is inadvertently injecting nervousness into the system," says Wolfgang Koester, CEO of dashboard vendor FiREapps. "If you set the tolerances too tight on a dashboard, you can set up this situation where everyone is getting hit with alerts that they have to respond to."