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From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

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Stephen Few on Pervasive Hurdles to Effective Enterprise Dashboard Design

Enterprise dashboard design guru, Stephen Few - author of the incredible book on dashboard design - Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, points out in his most recent enterprise dashboard article, Pervasive Hurdles to Effective Dashboard Design, that:

Most dashboard products are not able to produce dashboards that communicate effectively. This is usually due to one of more of the following three problems, which I describe and illustrate in this article:

1) Important dashboard display media are not provided

2) Display media are poorly designed for dashboard communication

3) Display media cannot be positioned on the dashboard and sized as needed

…Most dashboard software features display media that “look marvelous” but communicate poorly. If vendors invested as much time in designing display media that actually work as they invest in designing cute photo-realistic widgets that look like thermometers or automobile dashboard gauges, they would have much more to offer. They need to slow down and take the time needed to consider how dashboard display media are used and to test their effectiveness. No value is gained by making dashboard display media look like something
that they are not, especially when the result is cluttered with visual decoration that distracts from the data. If the information that people need is obscured by visual fluff, the dashboard fails.

Mr. Few convincingly argues his points with illustrations. For example, he notes that in the following enterprise dashboard screenshot - “Enormous effort was dedicated to the creation of display widgets that look like controls that you might find on an old electronic control board, such as one for mixing sound. Most of the measures were designed to look like LED (liquid emitting diode) meters, with tall stacks of green, yellow, or red light horizontal bands of light set in a framework of burnished metal. Old audio mixers used LED meters because that was the state of the art, the best that technology could offer at the time, but a computer screen is capable of displays that are light years beyond and much easier to read than LED meters.”

Is that great writing, or what? I love it! Writing so passionately about business intelligence display techniques. You owe it to yourself to subscribe to Stephen Few’s articles, and everything else this talented man produces, for that matter. Here is the screen:

sales order throughput led KPI indicators

Another example given is the following critique of the very popular Crystal Xcelsius flash-based charting displays:

Hard to Read KPI Pie Chart

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Last Modified: Thursday, April 12th, 2007 @ 17:02

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 10:12 am and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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"Dashboards By Example - BI Dashboard Samples" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

We strongly believe that the more dashboards you study, the more adept you will become at choosing correct design solutions for your company. "Learn by Example" is not just a motto - we take it literally, hence the name "Dashboards by Example". So take every chance you get to view examples of BI interfaces. As a matter of fact, take a second now, and study this dashboard example.

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Stephen Few on Pervasive Hurdles to Effective Enterprise Dashboard Design

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