Dashboards by Example
    Digital Dashboard Examples & Best Practices.   From Excel Dashboards to Enterprise Business Intelligence, these dashboards contain KPIs, metrics, charts, trends and data visualizations. Learn the best practices of enterprise dashboard design by studying the work of your peers on business dashboard implementation teams around the world. Examine their digital dashboards and share your dashboard design tips in return.

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MIS Cockpit Enterprise Dashboard - Putting Excel on steroids with Palo, an open source business intelligence tool

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.”

MIS Enterprise Dashboard

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

Excel Sales Dashboard

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.

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Last Modified: Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 @ 14:58

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 8:44 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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