Dashboard

One challenge for both dashboard users and IT departments is how to deal with the success of an enterprise dashboard. As we all know, once business users get a taste of the ease of use and at-a-glance understanding that an enterprise dashboard provides, they want more - lots more. Not only that, everyone wants something different.

The question becomes, how does the IT department handle these requests? Stack up the requirements for future releases? That tried and true solution does work, but, depending on the particular agility of the IT department, may take a while. This may be OK, but what about building in a self-service element into the dashboard itself?

The folks at Celequest (see http://www.celequest.com/products/lava/PerformanceDashboards.aspx) have taken this approach of allowing business users to personalize, modify and create new metrics on their dashboards without the intervention of the IT department. They’ve put up a roll-over tour of their performance/operational dashboard at the above link which I’ve taken screenshots from for you.

Homework: If you want to make users happy, include self-service features in your applications. Things like personalization, configuration and “remember my settings” go a long way toward usability. Look for simple to implement features that bring lots of usability. Take a look at this list of books on usability

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.

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Last Modified: Monday, July 10th, 2006 @ 07:09

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 7:09 am 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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