Dashboard

Here is a service management dashboard screenshot based on the CA Unicenter Service Management product. This dashboard features a large YTD departmental budget variance graph showing Budget vs. Actuals for the development, finance, HR, marketing and sales departments. Other applets show status (red/yellow/green icons), summaries and a view into an invoice.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

The Division for Research at the University of Albany (SUNY) publishes this performance dashboard to show how they are doing in the areas of research development, grant/contract administration, awards, reporting, and post-award activities. This scorecard looks like it was generated by excel. Each thumbnail graph has a green/red, up/down arrow to show state and trend. I would note that the graphs can be grouped more clearly. They seem to be in vertical order but the groups go across columns. I would dedicated each column to one group and have the column heights jagged instead of being even across. What do you think? 

Homework: Study up on performance dashboards with the book, Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. If you need to review graphing using excel, check out these books on excel charts .

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

The best way to get started in using Microsoft Excel for business dashboards is to grab an existing excel dashboard, take it apart and try it out on your own data. Here is a post that shows such a spreadsheet dashboard with a link to the xls file. 

I see that many of you Dashboard Spies out there are very interested in the tried and true excel spreadsheet approach to dashboards. Thanks to a download from javaplanetinc.com, there is this excel dashboard xls file for you to play with. Here are 2 screenshots. The first shows the graphic presentation of the data. There are 2 larger sections across the top of the screen. On the left is a pie chart showing salary by department and on the right side, we have a simple listing of outstanding balances. Below this section we have 4 smaller portlets (sales by region, budget by project, current output by plant, and sales by business unit). To show you that this is straight excel, I’ve taken a screenshot of the second sheet in the workbook. Try this with your own data and see what you come up with. Remember to send us your dashboard screenshots so that we can all learn how executive dashboards apply to your business.

Homework: Don’t ignore excel as a dashboard tool. It’s graphing ability is powerful and the number of users is unmatched. If you need a refresher on the tool, see these books on excel.

Reading Assignment: Continuing on our study of the Malik book on implementing dashboards, please read this passage and think about how your company would go about choosing a dashboard vendor:

VENDOR SELECTION

There were four key criteria and feature requirements during the vendorselection process:

1. Web based for ease of access, administration, upgrades, security, andso on

2. Industry standard to ensure that experienced resources could be hired

3. Recognized and well-respected leader in the online analytical process-ing field

4. Company that spends a better than average percentage of revenues onR&D to ensure that applications remain competitive

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

Dashboard implementation statistics. Ever wonder how many companies have implemented business intelligence dashboards or how far along they are in the process?  Take a look at the graph below from this computerworld article on dashboard implementations. Looks like there is plenty more growth to come in the enterprise dashboard space.

When enterprise dashboards reach a critical mass, and you’re fielding all those head hunter calls, you’ll be glad you were a reader of The Dashboard Spy “back in the day”. Remember the recruiting mania for talent in the ERP (Enterprise Resource Package) heyday? And i’m not just talking about technical talent. How about all those on the functional side that suddenly became so invaluable? This type of graph, by the way, is not the most intuitive to use for many people, but it does pack in a lot of information in a small space.

Tags: Dashboard Implementation, Dashboarding, Companies choosing a dashboard

Homework: Prepare yourself now for a bright career in dashboarding. We can’t call you, so you have to call us!! Seriously, this is going to be a hot IT topic everywhere, so get prepared. Start with these books on business intelligence dashboards.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books.

From the folks at integeo.com, we have this demo of an enterprise dashboard for law enforcement agencies to use to map the locations of crimes. The dashboard screenshots featured show graphs by various elements such as dollar value of the crime, status(apprehended, at-large), month, and type (assault, theft, vandalism). There is left-side filtering with the ability to save filters. The dashboards link to the mapping engine which can provide detailed geographic drilldowns and filtering of data points.

Homework: Spatial analysis and mapping applications are natural tie-ins for enterprise dashboard applications. Crime fighting dashboards are becoming a powerful way to effectively deploy limited law enforcement resources. If you want to learn more about this, check out this somewhat hard-to-find book on Geographic Information Systems and Crime Analysis. 

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

Here is a glimpse at a major cellular company's enterprise dashboard for tracking business service levels. Thanks to the Dashboard Spy who sent me the screen. The top section of this screenshot shows the previous day's availability figures for network data, voice and service. The lower portion of this enterprise dashboard features provisioning statistics. I'm a little leery of what I see in this section. Note that the red indications all happen to be OLO (other local operator) SLA alerts. The green service levels happen to be this carrier's numbers. Coincidence or is it really true that it's the "other guy's fault"? Hmm.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

Almost every digital dashboard uses color to indicate KPI states. Often the indicator is a little ball or box that is red, yellow or green. Dashboard designers struggle with end-user clarity issues such as color blindness, printing on a black and white printer, or simply too many different possible states. Thanks to a Dashboard Spy out there interested in server status enterprise dashboards, we have this screenshot of a remote server monitoring panel that has 7 possible states. To deal with the color issue (color blindness or printing on a b/w printer), we see that the red/green/yellow balls have symbols inside of them. There is a "no data" state that is represented by a black ball. The "disconnected" and "stale data" states have different slashes in opposite directions, and the "misconfigured data" ball has a question mark.

Homework: Usabilty is key when presenting to the end user through a dashboard. Study up on the discipline of usability. Start with these usability books.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.

Thanks to a Dashboard Spy in the healthcare industry, we have these management dashboard screenshots from a nursing home/assisted living facility. The first screenshot shows the main portal where text-based portlets feature summary information such as enterprise statistics, facility statistics, enterprise calendar, industry news and notes regarding operations. The drilldown screenshot shows the financial dashboard on the right hand side with left side navigation for slicing the data across regions. The financial dashboard shows the financial ratios (net margin, operating margin, days cash on hand, debt service coverage, revenue, headcount, etc) for the last 3 months. Average billing rates and accounts receivable have their own sections. The numbers are shown as well as up and down arrows to show trends. On the rightmost side, we have graphs.

Homework: When dealing with healthcare financial management, how do we juggle compassion and respect for our fellow humans with the realities of corporate management? Learn more about this rigorous field with these healthcare financial management books.

So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy's favorite books.