Dashboard

Thanks to this submission of an enterprise dashboard from a Dashboard Spy involved with launching a marketing program, we have a dashboard screenshot showing a dashboard used as a guided wizard, or navigation device. It looks to be some sort of marketing product or service. This highly graphic dashboard presents a sequence of six steps in setting up and marketing a business. Each step on the enterprise dashboard has an audio overview to explain the process and a series of associated actions. The right side of the dashboard features the icons used to launch each action.

This is a nice way of presenting the audio files and action links to the user. Its main value comes from the grouping of the functionality by business function or phase. It's a business-centric, user-focused approach that will often come in useful.

The steps are: Set up your business, Target your market, Set up sales process, Set up your web site, Do your promotion, and Maintain your business.

Homework: An explicit step by step approach is a good way to lay out any busines process to make it user friendly. In the case of marketing, take a look at these books on marketing step by step if you are not familar with the process.

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 on business dashboards.

Enterprise Dashboards with SAS GRAPH. Curious about dashboarding with SAS/GRAPH? Dr. Robert Allison (one of our smartest Dashboard Spies) has provided us with this example. As he states: “I decided to try out SAS/Graph and see if it could do a “real” dashboard like one of the mock-ups in Stephen Few’s new dashboard book (p. 177) - with a few small changes & enhancements.  I used SAS/Graph to do this dashboard - all the graphics are created programmatically from the data (i.e., if the data changes, I can re-run the same sas job to generate a new dashboard with the updated values). The web output is an html overlay, and a gif file - the html adds chart tips (aka, rollover text, alt text, hovertext, etc) for the bars, and could also provide drilldown links.”

The dashboard screenshot below is a two column layout with the following 6 sections: Key Metrics YTD, Market Share, Revenue YTD, Revenue Quarter to Date, Product Sales YTD and Top 10 Customers in the Pipeline. The first 5 charts use bar graphs and the pipeline data is presented in a multi-column table.

Thanks, Robert, for your effort in exploring this aspect of implementing enterprise dashboards. Your work is always appreciated. Won’t you send us more dashboards?

 Tags: Enterprise Dashboard, SAS

Homework: If you are not sure of what SAS/GRAPH is, check out these books on SAS/GRAPH.

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 on enterprise dashboards.

A Dashboard Spy over at vardentech.com is involved with the development of enterprise dashboards for tracking securities trading portfolios and investment transaction metrics. He sent the following dashboard screenshots and says that "eReportal, developed by Varden Technologies, is a web-based, enterprise-wide reporting platform for the investment management sector. Connecting to all ODBC-compliant or adaptable systems and data sources, eReportal is unique in that it provides industry-specific reporting tools and report styles while giving back reporting to business users, who now can design, create, and send out highly-graphical and interactive reports, without requiring IT involvement, in a matter of minutes. It meets all financial reporting objectives inclusive of operational, trading, compliance, and pre-sales. Reports can be created, ad-hoc, on-the-fly or be scheduled while transmissions can be achieved through highly customizable web portals, PDAs, and/or emails with multiple levels of viewing authorizations. The beauty is that implementations are completed historically within 3-4 weeks since connections have been written to many industry-standard systems and data sources".

The first dashboard is a portfolio summary dashboard with the Asset Allocation mix shown as a pie chart on the upper left. The upper right portlet is a table showing top holdings by security name and percentage holding. The bottom part of that table shows the most recent transactions. Details include action (buy or sell), security name, trade date, quantity and price. The bottom of the dashboard shows a wide chart plotting market value of securities classified by maturity.

The second screenshot is a trade metrics dashboard that shows key metrics important to the management of an investment firm. Trade counts, execution amounts and average commissions per trade are shown.

Homework: Investment management is distilled into all sorts of formulas and principles, as anyone studying for their CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) certification will tell you. Here are some books on investment management. The management of an investment firm, however, is challenging because of the sometimes quirky nature and needs of the traders and portfolio managers. This book, High Performing Investment Teams : How to Achieve Best Practices of Top Firms, explores this very nicely.

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 on business dashboards.

This enterprise dashboard screenshot is censored at the request of the Dashboard Spy at one of the major financial firms. This is a project status dashboard that is most often distributed at the company not electronically, but by printing it out and sending it via interoffice mail. It seems that the higher up the manager, the more they want it on paper. It is limited to a single page and, as seen in the name "One Minute Manager", it is meant to quickly bring a manager up to speed on project status and next steps. The Dashboard Spy that smuggled this out for me actually brought out a sheet of paper and scanned it. He apologies for the crooked scan job!

As you can see, this executive dashboard is text heavy. The graphics are simple red/green/yellow representations of project state. The company has standardized on this layout as the project status reporting format. At the top of the page is project information and the overall status. Below that we have last month's actual activities, the current month's planned activities, and longer term planned activities. The right hand side has open issues and project risks.

Homework: Project management is a favorite dashboarding subject. If you need to review the science behind the metrics of project management, check these books on project metrics. In particular, this book focuses on project scorecards: The Project Management Scorecard: Measuring the Success of Project Management Solutions

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 on business dashboards.

By popular demand, we present again the Robert Scoble Executive Dashboard. As you know by now, the Scobleizer, blogger extraordinaire, has announced that he will be leaving Microsoft to join PodTech.net, a start-up company that does video blogging.  Our original post on The Scoble Dashboard came out earlier in the year when Robert was joking about leaving Microsoft for Google. Who knew that he was really thinking about leaving after all? Seems like it was on his enterprise dashboard all along. If you don't know Scoble, check out his wikipedia entry.

Homework: Read Robert Scoble's book on blogging, Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers . Also, there are tons of other blogging 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 on business dashboards.

A Dashboard Spy over at simple-software.ca sent us this screenshot of an enterprise dashboard that tracks web metrics in real time. "It is a Java client application that allows you to view and interact with real-time web metrics sent from your web server. Collect data as visitors browse your site and view the data in the RTMon client application running on your desktop computer. In addition to traditional metrics, track individual page load times, per page CPU usage, memory usage and thread usage. Allows you to graphically view the data from traditional log files. RTMon shows individual data points, histograms, phase plots, and image plots for selected data."

Check out the download at this page.

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 on enterprise dashboards.

One of the really big changes in Microsoft's upcoming Office 2007 Excel 12 release is, of course, the big change in graphics. We've shown a couple of beta excel dashboards featuring the slick new look and feel.

Have you ever wondered at how Microsoft comes up with these graphic styles? They have a user preference testing program in place to poll knowledgeable users for their opinions on the User Interface and Graphics.

Here are some screenshots of a recent survey that was sent out to the testers. Thanks to The Dashboard Spy who sent them along for us dashboard enthusiasts to pore over. Note the final screen. As a thank you for taking the 20 minute survey, the participant is entered into a drawing for a $500 cash prize.

If you are curious as to the look and feel so far for Office 2007 and you don't have the beta, check out these screenshots at this really good discussion of Excel's new charting engine.

Homework: The new Microsoft Office 2007 will be a big change. As I've been saying, the new Excel 12 will have a big influence on the look and feel of executive dashboards for years to come. Take a look at these books on Office 2007.

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 on business dashboards.

For Sarbanes-Oxley compilance (SOX), we have this look at an enterprise dashboard screenshot of a balance sheet comparision. Nothing shocking on this dashboard. We have a grid with rows representing the balance sheet items such as accounts receivable, cash, inventory, current assets, current liabilities, equity, etc. On the left side of the sheet we have the internal numbers against the white background. On the right side of the dashboard, we have a blue background representing the auditor's numbers.

The right-most side of the enterprise dashboard has the Maximum Variance allowed and the calculated tolerance field. This critical KPI has a red/green/yellow visual attached to summarize the SOX compliance.

Homework: SOX or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was the result of the Enron-type hijink era. It's a big field for enterprise dashboards so study up on it. Here are some books on Sarbanes-Oxley. If SOX is totally new to you, start with Sarbanes-Oxley For Dummies.

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.