Dashboard

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.

We have this enterprise dashboard screenshot submission that features an implementation of the NimBUS Business Dashboard product. Yes, the same folks that gave us the soda machine dashboard. From the Dashboard Spy at nimsoft.com:

“The attached dashboard image visually splits the IT Service Desk function into two halves. The left side of the dashboard view graphically depicts Netstal’s Service Desk process flow. You can see problem/incident inputs occurring manually via calls from end-users into the service desk (depicted top) and inputs also occurring automatically via alerts from our NimBUS monitoring product (depicted bottom). The process flow continues to show incident processing through to problem resolution and communications of incident status back to the persons who originated the problem/incident request.

The right side of the dashboard view has an array of meters that categorize all open incident requests/tickets with ticket counters and alarm indicators when ticket counts rise to warning levels.

Interesting to point out - in the left-side process flow diagram you will find alarm status indicators positioned at key process points. The small and strategically positioned color-coded status indictors will draw attention to bottlenecks and backlogs in the incident handling process. This Service Desk dashboard contains real-time incident-handling performance indicators. This is key to quickly pinpoint and resolve problems in the service desk process.”

Here is the overall dashboard. It is wide so I split up the views in the following dashboard screenshots:

Homework: Take a look at the nimsoft gallery for more ideas. The process flow for the service desk service shown on this dashboard is a great reference, but if you need to brush up, check these books on help desk 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 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.