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.

Here's an enterprise dashboard that lets a school district track the demographics of its student and teacher population. This is a hot area right now.

The front page of the June 6, 2006 New York Times has the headline, "Court to Weigh Race as Factor in School Rolls". The article explains: "The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to rule on what measures, if any, public school systems may use to maintain racial balance in individual schools. The eventual decision on whether they can take race into account could affect hundreds of school systems in all areas of the country."

Now we all know that in order to maintain a balance of anything, we must first measure it. Sound familiar? Here's a hot tip for you enterprise dashboard experts out there. Mock up something similar to this dashboard, approach your local school board, and pitch them on why an enterprise dashboard is perfect for this situation.

This enterprise dashboard screenshot is for a high school down in Florida. While not the most gorgeous of designs, it does provide insight into the student gender ratio, the ethnic breakdown, and the test scores. Teacher information in terms of gender and race is available as well.

Homework: If you are not careful, a project like this can turn into a big political mess. All the elements are here to turn this into a powder keg – race, sex, reading test scores, etc. Be politically neutral and don't turn this enterprise dashboard into a tool for one camp or another. Brush up on the social issues with these books on education hotspots.

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.

A Dashboard Spy in the pharmaceutical industry sent me these dashboard screenshots. The first shows the sales performance KPIs of a drug tracked for a particular territory. Typically there is one sales representative per territory per drug in pharm sales, so we are basically looking at the sales numbers for one person on this enterprise dashboard. The right side of the screen shows the territory map and a sales chart. The left side of the dashboard shows sales KPIs such as contacts, calls and sales. There are the typical red/green/yellow visual KPI indicators. The second enterprise dashboard screenshot shows the tracking of physician visits, what this company is calling Target Doctor Activity. There is an extensive color key legend in use. In my opinion, it is over the top and unusable. Who needs 13 different colors? Better to show the data in another way on this dashboard screen. Good luck if you're color blind or print this out on a black and white printer.

Homework: Did you know that pharmaceutical sales representatives don't really sell? Of course, it's the pharmacy that actually sells you the drugs. The pharma rep is charged with increasing the number of prescriptions for his assigned drug in his territory. Learn about the ins and outs with these books on pharmaceutical sales.

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.

How big is your enterprise dashboard? Is it bigger or smaller than this one at AT&T's Global Network Operations Center. I really wonder what is the largest executive dashboard in the world.

I can't make out individual KPIs in the dashboard graphic, but I see that there are graphs, maps and data tables. If you look hard enough, you can make out some red/green/yellow dashboard indicators at the very left side.

Homework: Does size matter? Please keep an eye out for similar real-world, physical enterprise dashboards. I'd like to collect as many graphics of large scale dashboards as possible.

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.

The recent focus in this dashboarding forum on Excel dashboards has prompted Dashboard Spy emails with links to their favorite enterprise dashboard worksheets. Lynn points us towards this Excel business dashboard. It's a downloadable xls file. As you can see from these dashboard screenshots, there is a data input page and lots of nicely laid out charts. Try it out and compare it to the other Excel-based spreadsheets we've been pointing to. This one has a good set of business KPIs that are particularly helpful to small businesses.

Executive KPIs include:

Sales by Product
Total Sales
Total Sales Budget Over/Under
Cost of Goods Sold
Materials
Labor
Overhead
Operating Expenses
G&A Expenses
Payroll Salaries
Budget
Sales Expenses
Marketing Expenses
Research & Development Expenses
EBIT
Interest income (expense)
Other income (expense)
Total Nonoperating Income (expense)
Income (Loss) Before Taxes
Income Taxes
Net Income (Loss)
Cumulative Net Income (Loss)

Homework: Don't feel bad if you need to review the basics of graphing using Microsoft Excel. Start with these books on excel charts. A good excel charting basics books is Excel Charts 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.