Dashboard

Dashboard Spy Topic: Excel Dashboard Example.

Excel dashboard guru Chandoo offers a download of an excellent infographic he created using Excel 2010. Did you know that Excel 2010 has sparklines? Take a look at this awesome excel dashboard done in an infographic poster style.

Visit his post to download the excel file: Sachin Tendulkar Statistics Excel Infographic Poster

Chandoo offers other examples of information visualization done using Microsoft Excel.

Dashboard Spy Topic: 2010 Winter Olympics Scorecard from iDashboards.

The dashboard gurus at business intelligence dashboard software vendor, iDashboards, are continuing their tradition of helping fans of the Olympic Games track the medal counts of the competing countries.

Take a look at this dashboard screenshot. Use this link to try out the interactive iDashboards Winter Olympics Dashboard for yourself.

As you see, there are plenty of visual representations here showing all sorts of Olympic statistics.

Here is the medal count page of the dashboard:

The dashboards, which are updated daily, provide a summary of the day’s results and an interactive world map highlights participating countries and their corresponding medal tallies. The dashboards feature hover/click/drilldown functionality to explore each country’s results by sporting event and individual athlete performance. The additional dashboard provides even greater detail and the ability to compare results from across the globe with the help of graphic bar charts, speedometers, gauges, interactive country flags and medal icons.

Dashboard Topic: Excel School

The dirty little secret in business intelligence dashboards is that sometimes (and actually more often than you think!), Microsoft Excel is a perfectly fine choice of platform for a business dashboard.

And the even dirtier secret is that we business intelligence gurus are less adept at Excel than we should be.

Is it time to go back to school for Excel?

It certainly is if the Pointy Haired Dilbert of Chandoo.org is the professor!

Yes, finally, there is a comprehensive “school for excel” - taught by a real Microsoft Excel expert!

Go to http://budurl.com/exceltutorial to see details about this amazing excel course. Here are some details:

Visit to see a 15 minute demo.

Regards

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

This year, while saying “Happy New Year!”, I was also thinking “Good riddance!”. Face it, the year was a really rough one for many of you Dashboard Spy readers. Corporate earnings were horrible, revenues fell off a cliff, I.T. budgets got slashed, and many, many smart, hardworking people were downsized.

I personally attended goodbye lunch after goodbye lunch. The only good thing about them was the drinking!

Things were so bad in 2009, that even staffers on business intelligence related projects - previously thought to be resistant to cancellation - also lost their jobs.

Well, hang tight in 2010. While I can’t promise that things will turn around for your company, I can say that there are very specific steps you can take to make sure you remain a relevant, invaluable team member on business intelligence projects.

Here are my top 7 tips.

1. LEARN ALL YOU CAN ABOUT DASHBOARDS. I remain firmly committed to the idea that the dashboard design pattern is the optimal interface to all business intelligence applications. There is nothing like the “at-a-glance” nature of the dashboard to provide users with the smorgashboard of information they need to do their daily jobs. Dashboards have reached a critical mass. Why even President Obama uses an I.T. project dashboard to make sure that federal government I.T. spending is not out of control.

2. BE THE FIRST TO APPLY SUCCESSFUL SOLUTIONS FROM OTHER DOMAINS TO YOUR PROBLEM SPACE. There is no easier way to show your value in your enterprise than to be an innovator. In today’s economic climate, however, it doesn’t pay to take risks. Check out this clever, risk-free approach - look for things that are creating a splash in other domains, evaluate them to make sure they will add value in your space, and then be the first to introduce the technique. You will look like a hero. What do I mean? Look around in the web 2.0 space or the social media arena and identify innovative things there that you can suggest for your business intelligence application. As an example, perhaps your dashboard application would benefit from a “most popular metrics” section with KPIs voted upon by your community. As another example, look at http://klipfolio.com to see how business dashboards can be shown in a very innovative way by using the desktop widget approach.

3. KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS. The easiest way to become familiar with the top issues across your enterprise is to learn each department’s metrics. By identifying the KPIs and then decomposing them into their constituent parts, you learn what makes your enterprise tick. I recommend this approach to everyone, but especially people new to a company or a department within an enterprise.

4. PUT YOUR USERS FIRST. Become the user champion within your project group. Everyone pays lip service to user requirements, but learn the principles of user-centric design and really embrace the user. Insist on plenty of mockups and hold frequent walk-throughs with lots of users. The success of your business intelligence project lies with the perception of your user community. Make them an early part of your development process and get early buy-in. There is no reason for waterfall methodologies in today’s environment. Your users demand a more agile approach. Give it to them.

5. UNDERSTAND THAT INFORMATION VISUALIZATION IS A SCIENCE. Turning data into information is difficult. Turning information into a format that your users can easily understand is even more difficult. Understand the need for true expertise in data visualization. Don’t just slap pie charts all over your dashboards and applications. Find an expert or start studying the subtle do’s and don’t of information visualization. Not only can poor data visualization practices aggravate your users, it can cause wrong decisions to be made based on misleading cues in your application.

6. DON’T GO IT ALONE - WE ARE A COMMUNITY! Long gone are the days of solo practitioners trailblazing their way through early business intelligence techniques and technologies. Business intelligence and dashboarding resources abound these days. Learn from your fellow B.I. experts the best practices that will ensure the success of your project. Start with http://dashboardspy.com/experts and http://enterprise-dashboard.com.

7. REVISIT YOUR BUY VERSUS BUILD ANALYSIS. It’s not a cut and dried decision. Many excellent arguments exist for buying a business dashboard package off the shelf, building your dashboard application, or taking a hybrid approach where you combine the best of both worlds and customize an existing product. With the economy the way it is, and the prevalence of outsourcing, you can get great value when it comes to hiring talent. Advances in user interface programming allow for easy creation of compelling UI elements into your application. Of course, on the other hand, the off-the-shelf business intelligence dashboard and reporting packages are stronger than ever. What I’m saying is that at the start of this new year, you shouldn’t take any of your past decisions for granted. Revisit everything in light of our current situation and make the appropriate decisions.

A very happy new year from Hubert Lee, The Dashboard Spy!

Dashboard Spy Topic: Business Intelligence Dashboard Navigation (dashboard example: Oracle Interactive Dashboards)

By their nature, business dashboards encourage users to adopt a “smorgasbord” approach to navigation. Since a dashboard lays out details, summaries and graphs all at the same time, user is invited to use a browsing style of search rather than the traditional “known search” model. A well designed dashboard lets a user “think” their way through a session and explore various drilldowns and links as ideas come to them.

Today we take a look at how navigation can be placed down at the data table level. Of course, business dashboard have all the usual navigation devices. You will find global navigation, application-level navigation, sub-navs, left side navigation, drill down navigation in the charts and graphs, etc.

But have you explored using the elements of your data tables as navigation aides? Think column headings, or actual data values as navigation jump-off points, for example.

Take a look at these screenshots of Oracle Interactive Dashboards (via the post Navigation - Dashboard by Valentin Macovei)

Here’s a screenshot of the Oracle dashboard showing a small navigational popup for a data value (see the data table at the bottom of the screen).

That was an example of navigation from a value in a cell in your data table. Pretty cool, right?

Oracle Interactive Dashboards allows other navigational points to be used as well. You can navigate from column headings and also from charts (as is typically seen in drill down charts).

Here’s a peek at the administration screen of Oracle Interactive Dashboards:

And, by the way, the navigation points pass along data values to the next dashboard screen when clicked.

The Dashboard Spy

Every dashboard needs to display the status of various KPIs and metrics, right? We’re all familiar with the red, green, yellow statuses as indicated by little icons.

Here are some of my favorites. Maybe they’ll be useful to you:

Be careful to think through what the colors mean. You may think that the meaning of green is totally clear, but here is an example where, to me at least, there is some confusion as to whether green means take an action or don’t take an action. You’ll see in this video that green actually means “No” in the context of whether or not to go ahead. Strange? Take a look.

This video is an advertisement for a device that monitors the temperature of water and displays the result in a “glanceable” manner. It’s what we call an ambient device. We’ve covered real-world dashboards and ambient devices on The Dashboard Spy previously. More on ambient devices after you watch the video.

Ambient devices are a new genre of consumer electronics characterized by their ability to be perceived at-a-glance (also called “glanceable”). Ambient devices utilize pre-attentive processing to display information: the ability for the brain to perceive information without any apparent cognitive load.

Take a look at this post on the Ambient Orb and the Ambient Dashboard:

http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2006/03/10/the-ambient-executive-dashboard-a-physical-analog-gauge-that-you-can-hook-up-to-your-digital-dashboard/

Many companies are still just getting into business intelligence dashboards, so it probably is a bit premature to talk about Dashboards 2.0. But, we as a community have certainly learned a thing or two about the best practices of presenting business information through digital dashboards.

Let’s look at the cutting edge of dashboarding and see what innovations are happening there - particularly with the use of business dashboards as active messaging platforms.

What do I mean, exactly?

Start by asking yourself this question: How active is the messaging functionality in your corporate dashboards? Yes, you publish metrics and business indicators to your audience via tables and charts. Yes, you even have a widget on your dashboard that provides company news and “Did you know?” highlights.

But does your dashboard let you actively push a message to your viewers in real time? What kind of message? A system-based alert? Can it handle a human-published message?

Take a look at what Klipfolio is doing with Klipfolio Publisher. If you will recall, Klipfolio has been innovating in the business dashboard space through their unique “desktop dashboards”. These clever “gadget or widget-style” mini-apps reside on the the desktop and appear when you boot up your machine. No need to launch a specific app or load a particular webpage. They take up very little real estate and appear when needed. Klipfolio’s latest versions of the desktop dashboards take advantage of some very powerful messaging functionality.

Take a look at this message that comes from the dashboard widget:

Want to see how that message was configured and sent out? I’ll show you, but first take a look at this quick video of me talking about communicating to your user base through digital dashboards and urging you to download and try Klipfolio (go to this link: Klipfolio Dashboard .

Here’s what the admin page looks like for the creation of the message:

Here is how you set the severity level of the communication:

And here is the message down in the system tray area of your desktop.

Now doesn’t that give you ideas as to how your dashboard can be a more active part of your communication strategy to your user base?

Here’s a video on Klipfolio Publisher:

The Klipfolio Publisher functionality is part of the new Klipfolio release. Here is some info:

There’s 2 big changes for this release and a number of smaller ones. The first highly visible change is the addition of interactive pie charts that let users mouseover different pie segments to get more info on a given KPI. The second is a secure, hosted, publisher that let’s users share news and alerts with their team or whole organization via their desktop dashboards without any help from IT.

And finally, here is the press release:

Klipfolio Dashboard Simplifies Real-Time Alerts & Notification
New release gives managers and communicators publishing power without taxing IT

Ottawa, Canada – December 1, 2009: Klipfolio, Inc., developer of KPI dashboards, today announced the immediate availability of Klipfolio Dashboard version 5.3. The dashboard software now adds organizational and departmental notifications and alerts to its well-known strength in KPI reporting for operational decision makers.

While dashboard software aims to give workers the performance data they need when they need it, achieving this goal can also increase the burden on overworked IT departments. Klipfolio Dashboard solves the first problem by putting KPIs in front of every employee all day long. Now Klipfolio addresses the second problem with real-time alerts and notification that are completely self-serve and require no IT intervention.

KPI dashboards from Klipfolio are popular with Fortune 1000 firms like Baxter Healthcare, EMC and Lufthansa for improving data visibility for business performance metrics using a light-weight desktop dashboard that exposes performance indicators and drives application adoption.

“The new real-time publishing system is invaluable for employee alerts,” say Allan Wille, CEO of Klipfolio. “Above and beyond internal communications, every department needs to communicate with their staff. Klipfolio Dashboard Publisher let’s managers and communicators notify the workforce with anything from passive news to critical alerts that require acknowledgement – all without any added IT effort.”

The 5.3 release also builds on Klipfolio Dashboard’s ability to share KPIs at a glance. In addition to tables and bar charts, desktop dashboard users can now visualize KPIs in interactive pie charts as well as searching and filtering dashboard KPIs with a new find feature. Finally, the new version also adds support for Microsoft’s XML Excel spreadsheets – the .xlsx format.

About Klipfolio Inc.
Klipfolio develops Klipfolio Dashboard – the KPI Dashboard – to help the Fortune 1000 increase the visibility of key performance indicators for informed decisions that improve performance and profitability. It is the only business dashboard that presents operational information directly on the desktop where it’s always visible, accessible, and actionable. Clients include Intel, Staples, Baxter Healthcare, EMC and Lufthansa. For more information, visit www.klipfolio.com. For more information visit www.klipfolio.com, call +1.877.233.6149 US and Canada or +1.613.233.6149 Worldwide, or email sales@klipfolio.com.

“How to create interactive gauges in Adobe Flex Dashboards and connect them to dynamic data sources” is the name of an article by Pallav Nadhani of FusionCharts.

In the article, he demonstrates how to build the following Flex-based Weather Dashboard:

As explained in the article, the following architecture was used for this Flex dashboard:

Fusion Charts for Flex (gauges)
YahooWeather service (live data feed)
Main Weather Widget (See diagram below)

You can try out the Flex dashboard at http://www.fusioncharts.com/flex/demos/weather .

Tags: Flex Dashboard, Weather Feed Dashboard, RIA Dashboards