Dashboards are designed to give you an updated view for display purposes.
Select from the list of drop-down blocks associated with your system modules, configure the filters and adjust the size, save and view on the URL, that simple.
For example, you could have a dashboard in a reception showing # people onsite, compliance score, last incident date of type X in days, Last 4 audit results of type Y displayed as a line graph, # of open actions of type Z.