Dashboard

Dashboard Topic: Battle Planning War Room Dashboards

Ever feel that while you're in the trenches sweating it out with the actual workers in your company, your management is up in a comfy room somewhere just pointing and clicking while enjoying the gourmet coffee? Well, this war room of the future does its share in keeping the nitty gritty an arm's length away. Actually, I shouldn't joke, as the better the view from the top, the better off the ground troops are. Ordnance provider, BAE Systems, has posted this video about their war room of the future. The link brings you to a graphic of a dashboard and a link to the video. It's really big (over 60 megs) so I thought I'd grab out a bunch of screenshots for you. The basic idea is that the whole room acts as a big enterprise dashboard.

This first screenshot shows you the "before" - a hand drawn whiteboard with various KPIs.

This series of screenshots shows the "after". Here is the door to the war room:

The bird's-eye view. Note the various monitors. Some are large screen monitors and others are smart screens with touch interactivity.

This one shows more of the screens. On the left side you can see a video conferencing screen with a camera on top of the screen.

Some are TV feeds. Now it's confirmed that our war leaders get their breaking news from the same place we do - broadcast news!

Other screens monitor live action. Here is a video feed of a missile launching:

Some more screenshots of dashboard systems:

Look down and you'll see the controller tablet. It controls the entire room:

Take a closer look. You'll be relieved to know that Microsoft is the wartime OS of choice:

This next series of shots reveals some details of the dashboard featured in this room. I'd like to see what the icons on the last screenshot mean - but I suppose that it's top secret or something. Actually, I guess I shouldn't kid around about spies and screenshots when it comes to systems like these.

Homework: The tools of warfare will never be the same. Information is what wins wars. Start with these books on using technology to manage battefields.

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.

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Last Modified: Monday, August 27th, 2007 @ 12:37

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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