Anybody out there got a dashboard in their pocket? Some enterprise dashboard enthusiasts and I were talking about the dearth of mobile applications in the business dashboard space. Where are all the business dashboards on people’s phones and PDAs? I checked my collection of executive dashboard screenshots and really could not come up with compelling examples of mobile business dashboards. Here is a screenshot of a pocket pc application from 2003 that really never took off. A framework was created for a business dashboard application called  ExecutiveAware. It ran on Microsoft’s Pocket PC platform. The client handled the UI and all that was streamed down to the device was the raw data. The dashboard chart shown here running on the iPAQ looks slick, but how come it didn’t catch on? Anybody else have screenshots of this or any other enterprise dashboard app?

So who is the Dashboard Spy? No one really knows, but his growing collection of enterprise dashboard screenshots has captured the imagination of the executive dashboarding community. From excel dashboards and custom-built business scorecards, to xcelsius and flex-based visualizations, the dashboard screenshots at dashboardspy.com serve both as nuggets of inspiration and warnings of what not to do on an enterprise dashboard. These hits and misses will enlighten and entertain. Technology-neutral, and always business-driven, the Dashboard Spy website is the place to go to learn about the latest enterprise dashboard packages. Check out the Dashboard Spy’s latest recommended book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

Thanks to the Dashboard Spy in Germany who sent us this wonderful excel executive dashboard to study. It features an amazing amount of information packed into a tiny space (which is what the at-a-glance nature of the dashboard is all about!). The big secret, of course, is the tiny, little device called the Sparkline. Invented by the truly innovative Edward Tufte, it is a clever inline way to give a user a sense of scale, trend and historic movement of a statistic.

The dashboard itself deals with airline management. If it looks familiar to you, an earlier version of this airline dashboard graced the pages of the Dashboard Spy blog several weeks ago. It was the winner of a business intelligence contest. This current version is smaller and, in my opinino, cooler.

As Andreas from Bonavistasystems.com pointed out, this sparkline-driven excel dashboard is really optimized to be tiny:

All figures are formatted with Gill Sans MT 8 pt. The sparklines are formatted with Micro Line Charts 8 pt. The whole dashboard presents 340 figures on 420 x 420 pixels screen real estate. We build new hinted fonts that allow us to format colored sparklines as small as 8 pt without faint or hidden lines.

It was built with the new release of MicroCharts: http://www.bonavistasystems.com/DownloadMicroCharts.html

 Here is the executive dashboard. Take a look at these great sparklines!

Homework: If you have not been exposed to Edward Tufte’s work, you must browse these pages of books by Tufte. Design and information architecture are the most critical items to an enterprise dashboard’s success. Particularly with the executive crowd, know what you are doing in terms of laying out the dashboard. 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.

Dashboard Tags: Nursing Quality, Healthcare Metrics. Yesterday’s focus on The Dashboard Spy on how hospitals and other health care facilities use enterprise dashboards brought out a question on whether any organizations are using executive dashboards to track nursing quality. I checked my extensive collection of executive dashboard screenshots (I’m still waiting for someone to challenge my claim on having the world’s largest collection of dashboard samples) and while I didn’t find a nursing quality dashboard, I did locate some graphics of nursing quality metrics used at University of California San Francisco School of Nursing.  They have an enterprise dashboard dedicated to improving nursing quality. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get a hold of a screenshot, but I do have a look at some of the KPIs that they use and some screenshots of a similiar dashboard in place there. We start with this nice list of nursing quality KPIs. They include Operational Metrics such as RN turnover, filled positions, patient:RN ratio, skill sets, overtime, evaluations. Quality metrics include Falls, Falls with Injury (yikes!), medication errors, narcotics wastage, etc.  I like seeing the Satisfaction Metrics (rarely exposed) including: Overall satisfaction with nursing care, likelihood of recommending the hospital, satisfaction with pain control, overall rating of nursing unit, and perioperative feedback.

Homework: Involved with hospital management? Know the score about measuring clinical practice with the book The Power Of Clinical And Financial Metrics: Achieving Success In Your Hospital (American College of Helathcare Executives Management Series).

So who is the Dashboard Spy? No one really knows, but his growing collection of enterprise dashboard screenshots has captured the imagination of the executive dashboarding community. From excel dashboards and custom-built business scorecards, to xcelsius and flex-based visualizations, the dashboard screenshots at dashboardspy.com serve both as nuggets of inspiration and warnings of what not to do on an enterprise dashboard. These hits and misses will enlighten and entertain. Technology-neutral, and always business-driven, the Dashboard Spy website is the place to go to learn about the latest enterprise dashboard packages. Check out the Dashboard Spy’s latest recommended book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

From Cincinatti comes a couple of executive dashboard screenshots used at a hospital there to track profitability metrics. It is a popular main front-end tool for the Chief Financial Officer’s staff to pull financial reports. The first dashboard screenshot shows, on the right side of the screen, a panel where you can toggle the various reports and KPIs that you can show on the dashboard. The second executive dashboard screenshot shows some of the sophisticated graphing that dashboard users can use. This particular shot shows a bubble graph visualization of the profitability of a patient stay with length of stay as a variable.

Homework: If you are a health care professional and need to study up on the financial side of your business, start with the book, Financial Analysis and Decision Making for Healthcare Organizations: A Guide for the Healthcare Professional.

Note: 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.

Here are a couple of executive dashboard screenshots from an executive success coaching product called Best Year Yet. It’s an approach that’s big on making plans in advance and tracking your adherance to the plan. The first screenshot shows a tracking dashboard at the executive level. It shows the results by month of the distribution, executive, HR, marketing and production teams. The months are rated by color with a color key at the bottom of the chart. The second dashboard screenshot shows how the metrics are inputted.

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 who is the Dashboard Spy? No one really knows, but his growing collection of enterprise dashboard screenshots has captured the imagination of the executive dashboarding community. From excel dashboards and custom-built business scorecards, to xcelsius and flex-based visualizations, the dashboard screenshots at dashboardspy.com serve both as nuggets of inspiration and warnings of what not to do on an enterprise dashboard. These hits and misses will enlighten and entertain. Technology-neutral, and always business-driven, the Dashboard Spy website is the place to go to learn about the latest enterprise dashboard packages. Check out the Dashboard Spy’s latest recommended book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

The financial side of crime and terrorism can often be where the big breaks in these cases come from.  Today we look at how enterprise dashboard technology is brought to bear on the issue of tracking the money associated with such crimes. Specifically, we look at a dashboard for compliance with AML or Anti-Money Laundering statutes. The dashboard screenshots show a Deloitte system called AMLcheck in action. Basically, this dashboard is for financial institutions to check transactions and individuals against a database of proscribed persons and sanction lists to mitigate risk for the institution. 

As an aside, here is an excerpt from the United Nations charter defining currently proscribed persons:

Proscription under section 18 of the Act 6AProscribed person or entity(1) For subsection 18 (1) of the Act, the following are proscribedpersons or entities: (a) the Taliban; (b) Usama bin Laden; (c) a member of the Al–Qaida organisation; (d) a person or entity named in the list of the Committee, as in existence from time to time. Note Paragraph 4 (b) of Resolution 1267, paragraph 8 (c) ofResolution 1333 and paragraph 2 of Resolution 1390 require States to freeze the assets of the persons mentioned in this regulation, and of entitiesdirectly or indirectly controlled by them.

The bottom line is that our banks and other financial institutions have to be on the lookout for transactions possibly having to do with these proscribed persons. Well, enterprise dashboards to the rescue. The first dashboard screenshot shows the overall dashboard. We then show closeups of a transaction and possible name matches for the individual. The transaction then is checked against a list of red flags.

Homework: Check out this terrorism database dashboard with incidents dating back to the 60′s.

 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.