Dashboard

Tracking the statuses and comings and goings of vehicles in any decent-sized fleet can be demanding. Dashboarding, with its at-a-glance nature and drill-down capability, is a great approach to this challenge. Here we take a look at a vehicle fleet dashboard from the Agile FleetCommander product. The dashboard lists the leaving and returning reservations by name and time on the right side. On the left, we have the summary level numbers for vehicle activity, administration tasks and fleet management links. The next enterprise dashboard screenshot shows the vehicle optimization chart drilldown. As far as I can make out, D stands for Departure and C stands for Coming In?

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.

When local governments make the effort to supply their citizens with the knowledge and data that can make a difference in their lives, it makes a positive impact on the quality of life. As an example of a truly effective municipal website, see the Region of Peel. Their logo says “Working for You” and I think they really mean it. From gardening alerts, to local economic indicator dashboards, this site keeps the residents informed. In the sample dashboard screenshot below, note that the gauges on the bottom dashboard act as a navigational element that you use to view the various economic indicators. The dials themselves are merely decorative and not meant to indicate true values. When you hover over the various parts of the economic dashboard, you get a hover over message to indicate sections of this enterprise dashboard such as population change, taxable assessment, value of building permits, residential housing starts, labour market, existing home sales, Canadian manufacturing production, business establishments, business bankruptcies, and Ontario Works caseloads. The section above the dashboard graphic is split into a left column for use in displaying KPI graphs and a right column that is dedicated to text-based commentary. Oh, by the way, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, the region of Peel is in Canada. Specifically, it is in the province of Ontario and is the second largest municipality after Toronto.

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.

Enterprise Dashboards are usually built by the IT department for a business unit to use in tracking their relevant metrics. It’s always interesting when we get to look at dashboards built by the IT folks for their own use. Here is a look at how the MIT information technology department uses a dashboard to track how they are doing in terms of user support:

The user community at MIT is supported by the Information Services & Technology (IS&T) department. Back in 2002, they performed a study of the effectiveness of their IT services. Jointly with Stanford, they looked at the issues such as: “How are our IT investments performing? How can we use our IT systems to help manage ourselves better?” The first IT area selected for study was the IT Help Desk. The First Contact Dashboard was created and is still used today to monitor performance of MIT’s helpdesk support functions. As you can see from the enterprise dashboard screenshot, the primary measure is client satisfaction (an attribute that can be hard to quantify). At MIT, the individual components of client satisfaction are Availability, Communication, Resolution, Timeliness, Expertise and Professionalism. The KPIs are published on a weekly basis and distributed via pdf files. Available views include weekly, last six weeks, last three months, and last six months. Other miscellaneous statistics, typical of call centers and support operations, include calls, call length, abandonment rate, call wait times, cases, etc.

Homework: Getting involved with call center or help desk management? Start with these books on help desk management. 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.

More Homework: Study this passage from Malik on the cost factors of enterprise dashboards and tell me what you think:

DASHBOARD COST FACTORS

Like any other software initiative, a dashboard deployment tends to take ona life of its own as part of the organizational infrastructure. So, it is impor-tant to get a clear perspective on the total cost of ownership for an extendedperiod. The following are the main cost factors that must be considered for asuccessful dashboard solution:

• Software cost

• Annual support cost

• Additional hardware cost

• Initial deployment cost

• User training cost

• Ongoing support personnel cost

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.

We are well familiar with the usual ways big business uses performance dashboards - to measure and improve corporate measures, quicken agility in the market, boost shareholder value, blah, blah. It is quite refreshing to see performance dashboards used in a different light. Thanks to long time Dashboard Spy reader, Clint, we have this Florida School District Education Dashboard to study. This performance dashboard tracks the performance of school districts in Florida. It is done using Crystal Xcelsius. What is really of interest to me is how the dashboard is being used as the core of a local political action. Note the instructions on how to send the dashboard to others and how users are encouraged to make the dashboard the center of their citizen journalism. Clint was mentioning how he had some suggestions about the layout of the dashboard. It’d be wonderful if he would share some of his insight here. Thanks in advance!

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 Dashboard of the Day is a fun way to bring up a random dashboard example.

More dashboard related search terms that bring traffic to this page:

Dashboards
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The Balanced Scorecard
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The list goes on, but you get the idea. There is a large world of business intelligence out there and many find their way to the Dashboard Spy to see that others are putting on their dashboards.

Dashboard Spy readers come from all walks of corporate life. The visitor stats for this page shows me the variation of our collective interest in the vast world that is business intelligence. Let me spend a few minutes showing you the amazing variety of search terms that bring traffic to the Dashboard Spy collection of resources.

First, let me explain that this page is a mistake. For whatever reason, the CMS that generates these pages burped one day and out came this page with a very strange URL. I didn’t catch it for a while and so it got indexed by search engines and people found their way here. Now, of course, I can use various tricks to redirect the traffic, but I felt it instructive to leave it up and study the search terms appearing in my log.

Here’s a random look at some of the BI-related keywords bringing people here:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Business Intelligence Dashboard Search Terms ............

Why are dashboards so popular? You can’t walk into an Information Technology department without seeing a project plan for some executive dashboard or performance dashboard project.

Are dashboards really the new face of business intelligence? Why?

Yes, I firmly believe that dashboards are here to stay. This is why:

• Users find dashboards easy to use without insulting their intelligence.
• Partioning information into chunks mirrors the way humans naturally think.
• IT departments find them fun to build.
• Business groups find them easy to fund.
• Executives like the distillation of large amounts of data into at-a-glance indicators.
• Humans respond well to colors, visual candy and lots of white space.

Take a look at the example dashboards on this site with these factors in mind and you’ll agree with me. Dashboards are here to stay.