We’ve all heard about the demise of the family farm and the shift towards farming as big business. Did you know that half of hog production (traditionally dominated by small operators) is from large scale, multiple-site operations of over 50,000 head? The impact of this for us enterprise dashboard types is the growing need to manage agriculture via business intelligence tools.

Here is an enterprise dashboard from a hog production concern. The underlying dashboard product is the Farm SERVey Executive Dashboard by Farm Business Software Systems, Inc. They sell quite a few pig production software packages with great names like PigChamp, PigWings, and my favorite moniker, PigFlow/CashFlow.

The enterprise dashboard screenshot shows hog production KPIs such as Sales Trends, Percent Sold, Costs, Projections, Pigs Weaned per Week: 

The graph that catches my eye is this “upside down” one. It’s unusual to see such a graph. I’m no pig farmer, so I don’t know if it indicates losses per load, but does the lack of a positive portion of the graph mean that it never is a positive number? Here is a detail screenshot:

Here is a look at typical hog production details:

Homework: If you are looking to learn more about the business of farming, start with these books on agricultural business practices.

Note: Hey, Dashboard Spies!: Do you know how smart you are getting by reading The Dashboard Spy? From pig production to airplane crew size optimization to monitoring presidential campaigns, we’ve examined enterprise dashboards from all aspects of business. I’ll do my share to keep snooping around for those elusive dashboard screenshots that keep this dashboard screenshot collection interesting.

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.

PS: If you find yourself part of an enterprise dashboard effort, you must study Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise dashboards.

For many people, the most commonly and closely measured thing is their website or blog. And, of course, for many businesses, this is a hyper-critical area. Optimizing the performance of their websites has a direct impact on the top and bottom lines. We’ve seen many enterprise dashboard techniques applied to web analytics. In fact, many avid Dashboard Spy readers belong to the web measurement world.

I wanted to bring to your attention the KPI selection chapter of the book, Website Measurement Hacks: Tips & Tools to Help Optimize your Online Business. O’Reilly offers this free download of the chapter. It’s well worth the quick read. Here are a few screenshots I took from the KPI hacks. The tips offered apply to all KPI selection, not just for web analytics dashboards.

Here are a few suggested KPIs for web measurement:

This is a sample web measurement KPI worksheet. The suggested Key Performance Indicators include: Percent New Visitors, Percent Returning Visitors, Ratio of New to Returning, Conversion Rates, Average Order Value, Sales per Visitor, Customer Retention Rate, and my favorite, Percent of Visits Under 90 Seconds. (That’s a KPI that tells a lot!)

And here is a screenshot of a web measurement enterprise dashboard:

Homework: Do be sure to check out the free download and read it carefully. If you are looking for more background on web measurement, check these books on web analytics.

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.

How do you pick your KPIs for your enterprise dashboarding projects? If you are like most of us, we interview business users and scribble down their kpis, figure out what datasources to tap into and then code the calculations into our dashboards. Simple, right? But do we ever stop to think about how effective those KPIs are? Well, thanks to a Dashboard Spy who hangs out with some smart people at MIT, we get to see another way of choosing KPIs. Seems pretty good to me – what do you think? Time to start hiring MIT grads for enterprise dashboard projects? If you want to read the MIT paper for yourself, take a look at this pdf titled Airline Operations Feedback Control with KPIs.

First, you start off with a KPI brainstorming session and interviews to produce plenty of KPI candidates:

Then you rate each potential KPI according to various characteristics. For example, detectability is a key. If changes in KPI value have little impact on the output, it makes a poor KPI:

And you look at how precise a KPI is:

Here are some sample KPIs studied by MIT for airline operations:

Homework: Need to study up on these types of KPIs for your enterprise dashboard? Start with this list of books on airline operationsIf you are on an enterprise dashboard project, do yourself a favor and take a look at Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise 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 on business dashboards.

When they say that “the customer is always right”, they really mean ”the customer dashboard tells all through the customer behavior metrics”. Mining data gathered from customer transactions is a high value activity, especially when leveraging dashboard technology. Let’s take a look at a customer kpi tracking dashboard from a clothing retailer.

Thanks goes to the Dashboard Spy who shared this enterprise dashboard meant to monitor customer metrics for a fashion business. The underlying product used is by pilotsoftware.com and it’s a role-based, multiple data source enterprise dashboard. Note the view is chosen via the dropdown selector. It is showing “Customer Dashboard”, hence the appearance of the Key Customer Metrics, Trend on Returns, Top Products by Returns, and Top Stores by Returning Customers portlets. The Key Customer Metrics include: Number of Customers, Number of Repeat Customers, Advertising Effectiveness, Loyalty Rates, Revenue per Customer, Gross Margin, and Returns per Customer.

Homework: Need to brush up on fashion/apparel/clothing retail management metrics? Start with these books on clothing retail management.

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 digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s books on enterprise dashboards. His current favorite is Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing executive dashboards.

Unfortunately, terrorism has not gone away. A comprehensive terrorism activity database with data reaching back as far as 1968 is available at http://www.tkb.org/AnalyticalTools.jsp The database is presented via a dashboard-type interface as the following screenshots show. One can only hope, that in some way, our advances in Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Dashboards can contribute to the fight against this terrible activity.

Homework: Read up on terrorism here: books on terrorism

If you are on an enterprise dashboard project, do yourself a favor and take a look at Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise 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 on business dashboards.

In doing some research for a Dashboard Spy reader who was interested in creating a dashboard for elearning management and what performance metrics should accompany such an enterprise dashboard, I came across the ATutor Learning Content Management System, an excellent open source product. I’ll get to the Dashboard Spy reader’s request for e-learning management KPIs in a future post, but here are some screenshots of the ATutor product. It’s basically a way to create, serve and consume online courses that you can create. It’s quite robust. You can log in to the demo on the site and check out the features. Here are some dashboard-style screenshots for a taste.

This is the dashboard for the classes that you belong to:

You can even apply different themes to the course portal that you create:

Homework: If you are on an enterprise dashboard project, do yourself a favor and take a look at Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise 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 on business dashboards.

Enterprise Dashboard Tag: SAS / GRAPH Dashboards

This just in from Robert Allison, a Dashboard Spy reader who is contributing quite a few enterprise dashboards to our little collection here. Thanks!

Here’s another original/unique dashboard I’d like to submit to your collection.  This one was created to enter into the b-eye-network’s recent contest for question #4 (their “dashboard” question). Here is the website describing the data & question:
http://www.b-eye-network.com/newsletters/data_viz_contest/data_viz.html

They supply an excel spreadsheet with the underlying data and the following scenario:

You are a consultant who has been hired by a U.S. commercial airlines to design a dashboard for its executives. The information that the executive team wants to monitor has been identified and now its your job to create the dashboard’s visual design. You must try to display all of this information in some manner on a single screen such that the executives will be able to quickly identify anything that needs their attention and then have the means to discern enough about the situation to decide if they can ignore it for now or must perhaps take some action. It is up to you to determine the appropriate manner, level of detail, and means to display each piece of information.

Since the contest deadline was last Friday, I guess it’s safe to show this one in public now For those of you who want a look behind the scenes of my implementation, here is a link to the interactive web output, and the SAS/Graph code used to create it:

http://robslink.com/SAS/b-eye/beye4.htm
http://robslink.com/SAS/b-eye/beye4.sas

Homework: If you are new to SAS/GRAPH, of just not sure of what it 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 digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s books on enterprise dashboards. His current favorite is Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing executive dashboards.

By special request from a Dashboard Spy reader interested in using enterprise dashboards in the area of Health Care Clinical Performance Improvements, we present these screenshots from Methodist Medical Center of Illinois, a 330-bed hospital in Peoria. This organization was an early adopter of data dashboards. See this great article on how Methodist’s IT team started developing and implementing data dashboards in 2003, using dashboards to track and improve all dimensions of performance organizationwide, including market breadth and penetration, customer service/patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction, clinical quality and safety, and financial results. Board members, senior executives and physician leaders, service line directors, department or unit managers, and front-line staff review specific data dashboards regularly.

Here is the process improvement process used at the hospital:

The statement of the formal goals and establishment of the above process was key to the Performance Improvement program. As the article states:

Michael Bryant became Methodist’s CEO in 2000, and he raised the performance bar by setting a goal of being in the top 5% of every performance area. To achieve that goal, it was clear that communication of the goal and the status at the indicator level was a must. Methodist achieved that communication by using a simple stoplight color scheme, which provides clarity for all Methodist dashboards. “Green” indicates excellent work that should be maintained; “yellow” signifies a need for focus because performance is starting to lag; and “red” is an alert, indicating an immediate need for intervention and improvement. “We use these stoplight colors for every dashboard, whether measuring admissions, employee turnover, patient satisfaction, falls, or operating margin,” says Duvendack.

To ensure reliability and validity of data collection and analysis, dashboards should have rules that govern their development and implementation. “Behind the scene of any data dashboard is a strict set of definitions for indicator numerators and denominators, how measures are calculated, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and other parameters,” says Duvendack. “Consistency of dashboard construction and indicator calculations is critical, so a limited number of trained individuals at Methodist are responsible for working with the data that populate the clinical dashboards.”

In addition, because timeliness of the data is critical to effective response, rapid turnover of charts for abstraction is required. Clinical abstracters at Methodist review charts as soon as possible, generally no more than a few weeks after a patient is discharged. “In order to provide meaningful input to quality improvement efforts, the data cannot lag too far behind the care received,” says Duvendack. Data from chart abstraction are entered into the database. The PI department disseminates the dashboards weekly.

These are the bi-weekly hospital-wide dashboards used to enable the performance improvements in the hospital. I apologize for the low quality of the dashboard screenshots. This is the data the Heart Failure Care team uses. The PI staff releases unit-based disease-specific dashboards weekly. Front-line staff and all members of the disease-specific teams in the appropriate clinical units receive the dashboards via e-mail and other means. “We distribute report copies at team meetings and post the dashboards on PI boards, in bathrooms, and every other venue we can use to get the word out. Staff is very familiar with the dashboards,” says Duvendack.

This is the unit specific dashboard. Service line directors, physician partners, and core teams review the reports during weekly meetings, and teams identify “outlier” indicators that require focus. Weekly dashboards may not include all the cases because data are added on a “rolling forward” basis, but by the end of the month, all cases are included in the monthly report

Homework: For background on this please look at these books on clinical improvement. And if you are on an enterprise dashboard project, do yourself a favor and take a look at Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise 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 on business dashboards.

Thanks to a tip from a Dashboard Spy reader, I’ve been checking out the Palo open source tool at www.palo.net. The product is an open source business intelligence tool that works in conjunction with Microsoft Excel. It is basically a data store for Excel that permits incredibly huge amounts of data in a small number of worksheets.

Here are a couple of dashboard screenshots. The first shows the MIS Cockpit which is a demo application you can download and try. According to the site: “The application only consists of five Palo enabled screens. But these screens hold as much data as thousands of conventional Excel worksheets.”

This next screenshot shows a sales analysis dashboard using the palo product:

Homework: Getting into enterprise dashboarding with Excel? Review charting with this book: Excel Charts for Dummies. If you are on an enterprise dashboard project, do yourself a favor and take a look at Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise dashboards.

Update: Here is a thought provoking by enterprise dashboard guru Malik, author of the above book. In his intro, he defines dashboards like so:

The term dashboard brings to mind that panel under the windshield of a vehicle that contains indicator dials, various compartments, and control instruments. Its beauty lies in its functionality. It brings together all of the relevant data and functions within easy accessibility to the driver. It allows us to monitor important, even lifesaving data while performing the vital day-to-day task of driving. In addition, it provides an ease of use and comfort so as to make the multitude of decisions necessary during the driving task almost automatic, and certainly effortless.
 

For corporate decision makers, the amount of data that must be monitored and analyzed on a given business day is anything but effortless. Hunting through spreadsheets, calling in elite information specialists, and experiencing costly delays in the synthesis process—managing information is becoming more complicated by the day. Certainly, the time has come for a new vision of the dashboard that will meet the needs of today’s business professionals.
 

The term dashboard has acquired a vibrant new meaning in the field of information management as leading organizations worldwide embrace the idea of empowerment through improved real-time information systems. In the current corporate vocabulary, a dashboard is a rich computer interface with charts, reports, visual indicators, and alert mechanisms that are consolidated into a dynamic and relevant information platform.  

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.