Today’s enterprise dashboard is from a bit off the beaten path. But then again, that’s how we really learn best, isn’t it? By examining how dashboarding can be used in far flung industries, we can tease out the universal enterprise dashboard best practices that can make our application a better dashboard. This dashboard focuses on scrutinizing revenue trends and tracking financial KPIs and metrics for management of a gaming operation.

A Dashboard Spy looking into the challenges of maximizing slot machine revenue at an indian reservation casino reports in with these screenshots of enterprise dashboards dedicated to tracking gaming machine KPIs. Did you know that slots account for more than half of a typical casino’s revenue? The key factor is the gross revenue (or the “drop”) of these machines. Statistics are carefully kept down to the individual machine as these dashboard screenshots show. If you didn’t realize, this proves that it’s all about optimizing the total drop by carefully manipulating every element in the casino. This starts with the exact placement of every machine. These screenshots show gaming machine moves, destroys and sells.

The last screen shows the revenue of a certain slot machine. My question is when is the money actually counted for these statistics? A big concern in the industry is “skimming the drop”, that is, employees taking money out of the machines – usually the coins are diverted before the count room is reached. Does the technology exist to have the machines networked to report in real time the money received? That way, skimming is shown instantly with the discrepancy between the machine’s report and the actual counting room report. Shouldn’t this be straight forward?

Here is an interesting article regarding slot fraud from a 1991 CPA Journal article, “Control Testing in the Gaming Industry“.

Homework: Casino management is a very interesting topic. Take a look at these books on casino management. 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.

An excerpt from the Malik book for you to study. It has to do with the all important requirements gathering phase of a dashboard project. Storyboarding, wireframing and mockups – whatever technique you use to visualize dashboard requirements, it is a critical effort.

Storyboarding brings together all key areas of the dashboarding process that have been discussed so far: meta-information, audience, presentation,and alerts. The following steps may be followed through a dashboard story-boarding exercise:

1. Identify key user groupings

2. Identify key dashboard groupings

3. Determine the privilege matrix: user groups and dashboard groups

4. Sketch a dashboard layout for each dashboard group

5. Sketch a navigation sequence for each dashboard component on every dashboard template

Note that storyboarding is a high-level exercise that does not delve into thenitty-gritty of how and where to get the information. During this step, it is simply assumed that any information required for the dashboard display can be retrieved from the information biosphere of the organization.

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 fans, I’m just updating this old post because it came up in a recent discussion of design patterns used to let dashboard users configure their views and preferences. This dashboard example is particulary nice in how it affords the user a lot of customization in choosing their data. The drawback is that for less sophisticated users, it may get them into trouble. Oh, well, I suppose there’s always the dashboard help desk! Continue reading →

Thanks goes to the Dashboard Spy who tracks Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) dashboards. He sent me some screenshots of an ITSM dashboard that shows an SAP system being monitored in terms of its SLA, costs, performance and many other metrics. The underlying product is from mirror42.com.

Take a look at these dashboard screenshots. You’ll find many detailed and wonderful metrics. My only issue is with the last screen. It deals with the analysis of the service level agreement performance. Look carefully at the analysis options in the chart. Bollinger Bands and Donchian Channel technical analysis! Investment analysis techniques applied to IT service metrics? What the..? Are we saying that standard statistical analysis of IT system SLAs is not good enough? We have to try the controversial world of predictive technical analysis and charting from the world of securities trading? I don’t know if this is over-analysis or what. Maybe they had the charting engine sitting around from a trading system project. Does anyone else think this a case of overkill? Or worse yet, a mis-application of technology? Maybe I’m wrong and this is a new trend? Please let me know.

Homework: Two different areas to study. If you need to brush up on IT Service Management, the place to start is the book, IT Services Costs, Metrics, Benchmarking and Marketing. If you want to know more about technical analysis of investments, start with these books on technical analysis.

Tags: ITSM Dashboard, Information Technology Service Management Dashboards, Business Intelligence Dashboard, Examples of Dashboards, Dashboarding example

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 rather sneaky Dashboard Spy, we have this enterprise dashboard screenshot from a large financial institution’s trade management system. This dashboard shows positions, a maturity profile, deal statistics, deal action status, recent deals and a “pick a task” portlet.

I did some research and this looks like it is based on the Sungard Avantgard treasury management dashboard product (see http://www.sungard.com/products_and_services/treasury/).

Homework: This is a complicated field of dashboarding to attempt if you don’t have trading systems experience. If you like the sink or swim approach, better start with these books on trading treasuries.

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.

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.

Tracking media exposure and the resulting impact is a big topic in the world of marketing. Dashboards are often used to enable at-a-glance understanding of one’s media coverage. However, with a topic this far-ranging, a screen or two simply will not suffice. One public relations metrics outfit (see www.measuresofsuccess.com), produces something they call an Earned Media Dashboard in a pdf format that can run over 10 pages!

Here I show some dashboard screenshots from 2003 that tracked the PR metrics from the Howard Dean for America campaign. It’s worth studying in detail if you are interested in public relations metrics measurement. The link to the pdf was a little hit or miss for me, but keep trying the download.

This first enterprise dashboard screenshot focuses on what is called “Share of Discussion”, a metric that examines the percentage of coverage of a particular topic.

“Opportunity to See” is a concept that tracks how likely a certain PR item is actually seen by someone.

Here the PR dashboard drills down into the media exposure details.

Homework: This is a big area of study. One place to start is the book, Evaluating Public Relations : A Best Practice Guide to Public Relations Planning, Research & Evaluation. If your interest is more on marketing metrics rather than PR, be sure to check Marketing by the Dashboard Light. Also look at these books on marketing KPIs.

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 Jeb, our Dashboard Spy at protosw.com, we have the opportunity to study a professional trading firm’s set of dashboards used for managing equity portfolios. From our Dashboard Spy in the field:

“I love your site.  It’s pretty much the only place I’ve been able to find any material of use about dashboard design, and it led me to Stephen Few’s book – Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, which as proved useful. Proto Software develops a product that lets users build custom dashboards in a GUI-oriented way.  We’ve built several for users at banks and hedge funds.
I thought you might be interested in adding some of these ideas to your collection.

After collecting feedback from users, we learned two important things: First, real dashboard users really care about the data, and how much they can fit on the screen, not things like steering wheel graphics (loved that post!), so many of our dashboards have a more pared-down, table-and text heavy look now.

The second thing we’ve learned is that small tweaks to layout are extremely important for something someone is going to be looking at hour after hour, day after day, so we’ve made it extremely easy for users to edit layouts and formatting via drag-and-drop.”

Here is the Position Exposure Dashboard. The bottom table is driven by the selection of the row in the top table. There are plenty of controls to let the user configure the views.

You can drill down into the portfolio. Doing so brings up a pie chart which you can control to slice the data as you please.

When you need to adjust the portfolio and rebalance the mix of holdings, you use this screen. It lets you see the new mix immediately. Note the presense of the ever-so-popular “export to excel” button. This is one feature that all financial analysts feel they absolutely must have.

Homework: You can download the Proto Viewer product and try some of these tools for free, as well as get a free 30-day trial of the whole product.  The download page is: http://protosw.com/downloads/get/viewer. Earlier in the post I mentioned the love for Excel that financial people have. If you need to study up on using Excel for financial analysis, the must-read book is Principles of Finance with Excel.

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.