Enterprise Dashboard Tag: IT Management Dashboard, CIO Dashboard

Back in 2000, the Canadian Pacific Railway pushed a big scorecard initiative. A Dashboard Spy in the Information Systems department (a nice Canadian who calls his company the “choo-choo, eh?”) sent me a screenshot of the IS department’s digital scorecard. Ratings are gathered in the six areas of IT Leadership, Project Management, Service Delivery, People Management, Client Satisfaction and Technology Management. Red/Yellow/Green dials indicate the scores. Of course, Red was not an option.

I say that “red is not an option” only halfway facetiously. I was on a project where after many months of hard work creating an IT reporting dashboard, changing business flows and finally launching the dashboard, we saw that month after month, there was nothing but “green” status lights for projects and applications. The CIO thought of a great way to handle the situation. He said “What you are telling me is that you never have any issues. That must mean that your IT budgets are too high. I’m cutting them until I see some red lights.”

Needless to say, accurate reporting was seen after that!

Homework: If you are using dashboards to measure project performance, a must-read book is The Project Management Scorecard: Measuring the Success of Project Management Solutions. For Side 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.

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Back in 2000, the Canadian Pacific Railway pushed a big scorecard initiative. A Dashboard Spy in the Information Systems department (a nice Canadian who calls his company the “choo-choo, eh?”) sent me a screenshot of the IS department’s digital scorecard. Ratings are gathered in the six areas of IT Leadership, Project Management, Service Delivery, People Management, Client Satisfaction and Technology Management. Red/Yellow/Green dials indicate the scores. Of course, Red was not an option.

Homework: If you are using dashboards to measure project performance, a must-read book is The Project Management Scorecard: Measuring the Success of Project Management Solutions. For Side 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.

Here is an online demo of a psychiatric patient monitoring dashboard used at the Stanford Medical Center psych unit. I really like the no-nonsense design of this enterprise dashboard. It is quite appropriate for its use and environment. It looks clean with a clinical flavor and is yet slick because of its functionality. You have to try out the collapse/expand of the charts and the notes section. This well-done digital dashboard speaks for itself. I’m sure that it is a big success with the medical staff.

Homework: The best way to make sure that your dashboard is a success is to really pay attention to the design phase of the project. Well worth studying is this lavishly illustrated book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

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.

Here’s a copy of Mr. Goodwrench’s inspection report. As you can see, it’s a real-world, physical dashboard using red/yellow/green indicators. The mechanic uses the sheet to report to you what has been and has yet to be done on your car. The red/yellow/green usage is a bit of a stretch. Does red mean it must be taken care of now because of safety? Or does it mean, take care of it next visit. I ask because it states that green means that the problem has been taken care of. Do things go from red to green during the course of one visit? Somehow, the old, trusty red/yellow/green from enterprise dashboards doesn’t seem to fit a scenario where someone is trying to sell you services.

Update: On further “inspection” (ha ha, get it? auto inspection? – oh, never mind), it looks like it might work like this: You pay for an oil change and the mechanic pulls out this sheet. Note that the lube, oil and filter service items are printed with the word “Completed” already filled in. Mr. Goodwrench then inspects your car and uses yellow or red to point out necessary repairs. Not bad actually.

Homework: The best way to make sure that your dashboard is a success is to really pay attention to the design phase of the project. Well worth studying is this lavishly illustrated book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

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.

Competive dashboarder Robert Allison sends us this great real estate investment analysis dashboard. (Bet you didn’t know there are people who build enterprise dashboards competitively, did you? See below.)

As Robert explains:

Ok – here’s one of my latest dashboard creations…

This is a dashboard that might be useful to someone in the Real Estate business (or maybe even banking, construction,
home furnishings, landscaping, and other business that might like to know where the “hot” real estate markets are

One noteworthy feature is the consistent use of colors throughout all the plots (for example “Melancholy Acres” is
blue in all the graphs).  Also, I tried to organize & arrange the graphs so that the closely-related graphs are physically
close to one another.  I chose boxplots to summarize the data, and where the data was available I used a triangular marker to show the “previous year’s median”.

You can try out the web version of this dashboard (with html charttips & drilldown) on the following samples page (it’s
the bottom/right sample).  The actual sas code is provided there as well – feel free to re-use the code with your data!
I would be very interested in seeing what enhancements you will inevitably add

   http://robslink.com/SAS/dashboards/aaaindex.htm
This example was prepared for question/scenario #3 in the recent b-eye-network contest, and was created using SAS/Graph…

   http://www.b-eye-network.com/newsletters/data_viz_contest/data_viz.html

   http://www.sas.com/technologies/bi/query_reporting/graph/index.html

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.

The at-a-glance approach that is so critical to enterprise dashboards is so compelling that it is becoming prevalent in corporate communications. The 2005 annual report for TNT, a world-wide transportation management company, used a visually pleasing financial dashboard approach to communicate the year’s financial results.

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.

This is a digital dashboard submission by an Italian Dashboard Spy. Grazie, signore. We have here an enterprise dashboard system for use in a telecommunications company to track performance metrics of a Voice Over IP or VOIP network. The various gauges track the number of calls by various criteria. I’m puzzled as to what the number labels in the metrics mean but that’s simply because of lack of subject matter expertise. I suppose they represent certain telephone lines or groups? Also, what exactly are the “Units” in the Last 5 Minutes of Calls metric? How is volume measured?

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.

This enterprise dashboard or business cockpit is a true historical gem.  It hails from back-in-the-day when the dashboard metaphor was taken literally and graphics were rudimentary.

The dot-com boom didn’t make me rich, but then again, the dot-com bust didn’t make me poor either. I do have an interesting remnant from those days though. Did you ever hear of an enterprise dashboard from Accenture called the Dot-Com Flight Simulator Dashboard? It was a tool used during outrageously priced consulting gigs back then to determine how much “value” a start up would generate. I’m sure that this little dashboard did its share in fueling the hype and hopes of the era. Read up on this Accenture methodology and take a look at this screen. The underlying concept was based on the value of the “network effect”. The graphics aren’t much to look at, but remember, this was in the era of cocktail napkin business plans.

Tags: Early Enterprise Dashboards, Mock-ups

Homework: Please read the following paragraphs from the Malik book on dashboards and be prepared to discuss it:

The term dashboard brings to mind that panel under the windshield of avehicle that contains indicator dials, various compartments, and controlinstruments. Its beauty lies in its functionality. It brings together all of therelevant data and functions within easy accessibility to the driver. It allowsus to monitor important, even lifesaving data while performing the vitalday-to-day task of driving. In addition, it provides an ease of use and com-fort so as to make the multitude of decisions necessary during the drivingtask almost automatic, and certainly effortless. For corporate decision makers, the amount of data that must be monitoredand analyzed on a given business day is anything but effortless. Huntingthrough spreadsheets, calling in elite information specialists, and experi-encing costly delays in the synthesis process—managing information isbecoming 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 businessprofessionals. The term dashboardhas acquired a vibrant new meaning in the field ofinformation management as leading organizations worldwide embrace theidea of empowerment through improved real-time information systems. Inthe current corporate vocabulary, a dashboard is a rich computer interfacewith charts, reports, visual indicators, and alert mechanisms that are consol-idated into a dynamic and relevant information platform.

What really happened during the dot-com era? Check it out with these books on the dot-com boom and bust.

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.

If you are new to Microsoft SharePoint, the fastest way to see what can be done using the product is to actually try out different applications created using SharePoint. Live sites of any sore are difficult to find, nevermind dashboard or scorecard apps. Here is a demo of a business scorecard done in SharePoint. You’ll need to enter “visitor” as the username and password. Navigate to the Business Scorecard section by clicking on the tab. The links are interactive and bring up various charts. The overall scorecard is divided into sections such as Sales, Production, Finance, Human Resources Management and Quality Assurance. Each indicator is a red/yellow/green or chart graphic. Here is the dashboard screenshot:

Homework: For tips on using dashboards to measure performance, please see the book Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. 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.

A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me to ask for a greater focus on KPIs. He says that while the visual aspects are important, it’s the KPI metrics that make or break a dashboard application. I agree. So to start off the more intense study of KPIs and metrics, here is a posting with plenty of metrics to chew on for marketing types.

RADAR is an enterprise dashboard product from hillandknowlton.ca that automatically tracks over 8000 media sources looking for mentions of your company. Their enterprise dashboard then displays to you various metrics to let you know how your media visibility is. The company helpfully has provided a list of metric types. These media coverage metrics fall into the two types of Quantitative metrics and Qualitative metrics. The quantitative metrics include Share of Voice, Newswire, CEO, Publication, Financials and Internal/External Communications. Qualitative dashboard metrics include Favorability, Issues, Surveillance and Analysis. Keep in mind that like other similar services, the automated processes have to be smart enough to distinguish between positive and negative tones.

Homework: Study up on the lucrative field of brand marketing and management. This is a field ripe for dashboarding. As you can see, the technology has become quite impressive. Start with these books on brand 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.