Dashboard

A fellow business intelligence dashboard designer and I were reminiscing about an enterprise dashboard built by Hyperion for soccer fans. I dug through my extensive collection of BI dashboards and finally found it. Here are the enterprise dashboard screenshots. They are described by Hyperion on their developer network.

This first screen shows matches by various attributes such as location and date. Note the layout of the dashboard. The left column contains two types of data filters. The top section contains quick filters and the lower section has active filters.

This next screenshot shows a calendar view of the matches:

This next dashboard screenshot shows the structure of the tournament:

This next executive dashboard screenshot has a graph of various world cup KPIs:

Group rankings are studied from this dashboard screenshot:

Results and statistics are shown on this screen:

 The statistics are recapped in this screen:

As mentioned above, I dug these screenshots out of The Dashboard Spy Screenshot Collection. I am proud to brag that this is the galaxy’s largest BI dashboard collection. What do you think?

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

In speaking to an enterprise dashboard project member, who also happens to be a physician involved with hospital management, I reviewed a series of screenshots from my dashboard collection of a hospital dashboard from the year 2002. I remember it well because of the fine documentation that accompanied the project. It was featured at the 2002 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society meeting. I looked for it on the web and, sure enough, here is a detailed description and analysis of the Real-Time Bed Management and Census Control Dashboard project.

The challenge of the enterprise dashboard project was to provide a hospital with the enabling technology to maximize bed resources, manage census levels, reduce emergency room wait times and avoid patient diversions.  The solution, called the BMD or Bed Management Dashboard presented information from the hospital’s ADT (Admission/Discharge/Transfer) system in an easy-to-understand format to allow users to access, analyze, and display historical and current patient and bed information.

The project members at the time were quite proud to call their product “An Air Traffic Control Tower for Beds”. As the document states:

For those interested in the architectural details of the enterprise dashboard, here is a visio diagram depicting the various components. 

Here is the enterprise dashboard itself. Note the rich client nature of the project. The KPIs available include total occupancy, sorts by unit, service, and physician, and attributes such as available, monitored, occupied, percentage occupied, staffed and inactive:

Here are some screenshots that illustrate the usage and workflow:

Be sure to read through the pdf if you are interested at all in hospital management dashboards.

Tags: Hospital Management Dashboards, Enterprise Dashboard, Executive Dashboard, Business Dashboards, Dashboard Design

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Long-time Dashboard Spy reader Tom sent me his latest enterprise dashboard screenshots. He’s been creating some very exciting Adobe Flex-based business intelligence systems where the user can enjoy the interactivity that comes from flash-based (swf) files. The demo of the VFX Platform is an impressive presentation of the data from the famous Contoso scenario and allows for some great interactivity. As Tom explains:

This dashboard page view, was built in Adobe Flex via the VFX Platform. Using the rich set of visual components in VFX and Flex we were able to make a compelling visual analysis tool that allows for dynamic slicing along 4 dimensions of data (geography, time, market segment, net-promoter.)   The VFX Platform allows developers to take any compiled Flash .SWF (Adobe Flex OR any other like Xcelsius) and simply upload them to the dashboard portal and then manage access to them via built a built in role based security and content management system.   Once a .SWF is uploaded into the portal it is completely secure and allows end users to then snapshot various charts, graphs, and components to create their own dashboards on the fly.   Demo here:  http://www.dashboardcompany.com/demos/gallery.html

I’m always interested in the usability of enterprise dashboards. I really like how the functionality is explained to the user via the use of the right-side instruction panels (see the description tab on the panel to the right of the business visualizations).
 

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Dashboard Spy Info: This is another post in the series of business intelligence dashboard studies done by a mysterious individual known only as The Dashboard Spy. No one knows who he is, but his collection of BI Dashboards is becoming quite famous. If you have a business dashboard project that you would like to have featured, send Dash an email at info -at_ enterprise-dashboard.com. Please replace those characters with the @ sign.

Enterprise dashboard users often require quite a bit of helpdesk-type coaching or, at the very least, be provided with adequate documentation and help manuals. Documentation must always be in business language (never technical) and be as straight forward as possible. A conversational tone often helps. Sometimes, even an “idiot’s guide to enterprise dashboards” approach  will work wonders.

That brings us to the topic of today’s post. Here is the really neat Dummiez Book Cover Generator. Take a look below at the Enterprise Dashboard Design for Dummies cover that I generated.

Another way to use such a graphic is to lighten the tone of a project. At the start of an enterprise dashboard project, or even at the end of the project, it’s often effective to poke fun at yourselves. You can be facetious and portray the team as the know-it-all business dashboard team or the team of complete idiots.

Send me the enterprise dashboard related graphics that you generate and I’ll post it in the Dashboard Spy blog.

Seriously, if you aren’t a fan of the Dummies books, they are great. Take a look at this one on Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies .

Update: If you don’t know by now, the above book cover is a joke. However, the following one isn’t:

Read the table of contents here at this post about Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports for Dummies Book.

To purchase the book, use this link. 

Dashboard Spy Info: This is another post in the series of business intelligence dashboard studies done by a mysterious individual known only as The Dashboard Spy. No one knows who he is, but his collection of BI Dashboards is becoming quite famous. If you have a business dashboard project that you would like to have featured, send Dash an email at info -at_ enterprise-dashboard.com. Please replace those characters with the @ sign.

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Dashboard tag: Dashboard Storyboard, Wireframes, Mockups. Enterprise dashboard designers spend a lot of time with users - first in listening to their business requirements and then getting approval for their wireframes and mockups. I was discussing the best way for a team of interaction designers to explain the flow of a proposed enterprise dashboard and was reminded of a great article on the use of Guided Wireframe Narratives over at boxes and arrows. The challenge of mocking up an enterprise dashboard is that the flow through the dashboard is never linear. That’s the beauty of the dashboard as a design pattern. Rather than a menu or wizard driven approach where the interaction designer forces a user through certain sequences, an enterprise dashboard serves as a visual smorgashboard of navigation choices. The appearance of a certain alert in a particular area will trigger a path through the application that is hard to forecast.

The article explains how to use powerpoint to add a narrative element to your wireframes. The resulting presentation looks like the following. As you go through the presentation slides, various speech bubbles provide the narration through the enterprise dashboard flows:

If you are wireframing an enterprise dashboard, please be sure to check out the Dashboard Spy Wireframing Tool.

Tags: UI Design, Enterprise Dashboard Design Best Practices, Wireframing, Storyboarding, Story Board

Homework: Think about the reason why enterprise dashboards are so hot right now. Here is some input from the Malik book:

The early years of the 21st century have seen a convergence of several management thoughts that further that age-old quest for theright informa-tion at the right time. The dashboard is the new face of the emerging infor-mation management field. Dashboards have become the vehicle of execution for several key initiatives being implemented among organizations world-wide. Some of those initiatives include Balanced Scorecard, Enterprise Per-formance Management (EPM), also referred to as Business or CorporatePerformance Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), SixSigma, and the regulatory compliances such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. In hindsight, dashboarding seems to reflect the natural course of pro-gression in the quest for improved information and better decision making.Almost every organization has experienced an exponential growth in com-puting power and data volumes during the past years. This growth drives theorganizational management to create more enlightened decision-making pro-cesses in an information-rich environment. During the past decade, capabilities for data analysis and data mininghave made great strides as computing power has followed Moore’s law1ofdoubling every year. 

Business Intelligence Dashboards Rule!!

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Enterprise dashboard users drive their businesses via the monitoring that they do with their business dashboards. Usability and usefulness are the deciding factors when it comes time to deem the dashboard a success or not. User-friendliness is always the main objective. I was reminded of this by a recent online experience:

The Dashboard Spy practically lives on his cell phone and uses Cingular’s online account maintenance function. It is laid out in a dashboard style presentation as you can see from the screenshot below.

I logged into the account, looked around and decided to go to view usage metrics for my account. To do so, you have to provide your credentials again, which I did. I promptly got the following screenshot and almost fainted:

My first thought (and second and third thoughts!) was that my account was closed! After all, that’s what it says doesn’t it? Actually no, it meant that “My Account”, as in the section of the application called “My Account” was closed. My account was actually ok. “My Account” was down for maintenance? Is that stupid or what?

This is a classic type of GUI Blooper. Have you read the great book called GUI Bloopers: Don’ts and Do’s for Software Developers and Web Designers?

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Dashboard Spy readers keep us in tune with the many ways enterprise dashboards are being used in today’s corporations. Earlier this week I was sent to this sales conversion analysis article. It features these two screenshots of an enterprise sales dashboard. I have clipped the analysis commentary below the screenshots:

Enterprise Dashboard Screenshot # 1 (These dashboards are based on the On2Biz product)

This is a pipeline for one month for a particular sales person. The metrics that are shown in the report above are:

1. Milestone - Milestones indicate the stage of sales in the sales process.

2. Pipeline - Pipeline indicates value and number of projects that are currently at various milestones.

The number of projects in the pipeline should be highest at the lead stage, and gradually reduce towards the bottom. In the example above, there are not enough projects at the beginning of the pipeline. This may hamper sales flow in the following period.

3. New - Indicates the number of new projects that have arrived at the corresponding milestone in the report period selected (1 month).

Each milestone should have some new projects each month. No new projects indicates that the sales process may be taking too long, or that there is not enough activity.

4. Inactive - Indicates the number of projects that are inactive for more than 1 week (or period specified in configuration) at the time the report is generated.

This column has two numbers shown as X / Y, where X are projects that are inactive due to lack of any sales activity, wyile Y are projects that may have activity, but have not shown any progress in milestones. Ideally, X should be low or zero, indicating enough sales activity is being carried out. Y indicates lack of progress.

5. Average Project Value - Indicates the average value of projects at the corresponding milestone.

The average value gives an indication of the size of orders that are being worked on. When comparing pipelines of sales persons, one can find out which sales persons are working on smaller value projects, but may have larger number of projects, and which sales persons are working on fewer, hopefully larger value projects.

6. Weighted Pipeline Value - Indicates the value of projects at the corresponding milestone, based on the probability of conversion.

The probability of conversion is automatically calculated by On2Biz, based on the history of conversion of the particular sales person, product category or sales team for which the pipeline report was generated. Ideally, the weighted value should be equally distributed in all the milestones, which ensures smooth sales flow. Lack of enough weighted value at any critical stage is an early warning for potential trouble to come.

7. Funnel - The funnel shows a cumulative performance of all projects in the selected category and period. It shows the total number of projects that have passed the corresponding milestone in the period for which the report was generated.

The shape of the funnel indicates the rate of conversion of projects along the different milestones. The funnel should be consistently tapering down, indicating healthy sales conversion.

8. Conversion Ratio - Indicates the rate at which projects are getting converted with respect to the total number of projects in the funnel.

The critical conversion ratios to watch are the top and bottom - conversion of leads to opportunities, and order conversion. If the conversion of leads to opportunities is not high enough, it indicates that the quality of leads being captured may not be good enough. Order conversion should be consistent, as per benchmarks of the particular industry or market. A low order conversion ratio indicates lack of sales effectiveness. However, if the order conversion ratio is too high, it may not necessarily be good. It may be a sign of under-utilization of sales resources - you may be playing too small a game.

Drilling down from the pipeline report
One can drill down from this report to the list of projects for the following metrics:
1. Click on the pipeline value to get a list of projects that are currently at that milestone
2. Click on the number of new projects to get details of the projects
3. Click on the Inactive projects X / Y to get the corresponding projects that are inactive. Both X and Y are separate links.

Key Performance Indicators
To understand how the above metrics can be used as key performance indicators, let us see another example of a pipeline report to compare with the previous one:

Enterprise Dashboard Screenshot # 2

Analysis:

Let us compare the above pipeline with the one previously shown:
1. Shape of the funnel - Firstly, the shape of the funnel now looks warped. Compare this with the previous report, where the funnel was gradually tapering. The bulge in the middle indicates that this sales person has projects that have directly entered the quotation stage and not as converted leads. This is likely because these may be repeat orders by existing customers (one can see the details of the projects by clicking on the corresponding pipeline value). So the sales person may be overly dependent on repeat orders and not putting enough effort on new leads - or in this case, just sitting on the leads without working on them.

2. Distribution of Weighted Pipeline Value - Compared to the previous example, this report shows a different distribution of the weighted value. There is a larger weighed value of the top, and smaller weighted value at the bottom. However, if one looks at the new and inactive columns, it shows that these leads may be all old, and lying around without any progress. Hence if there is any deviation from a uniformly distributed weighted value, it could be a sign of trouble.

3. Lead Qualification Ratio - This report shows only 73% leads are being qualified, while in the previous report, 92% leads were being qualified. This may indicate that leads being captured are not good enough, or as in this case (evident from the inactive projects), the sales person is too lazy to work on the leads.

4. Order Conversation Ratio - This report shows an extraordinarily high order conversion ratio of 67% - a sure sign of trouble!!! A high order conversion ratio is a sure indication of under-utilization of sales resources. The earlier report showed only 7% conversion, but all other KPIs were good.

Had we used the conventional method of measuring performance only on value of orders converted, the second sales person would have been considered a better performer than the first. On2Biz pipeline report therefore simplifies the performance management by using a broader set of Key Performance Indicators, which ensure consistent sales effectiveness across the entire sales team.

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 construction projects, we’ve examined enterprise dashboards from all types of business divisions. Let’s keep those enterprise dashboard screenshots coming. PS: 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.

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

In chatting with an enterprise dashboard designer who is starting a balanced scorecard project for a major corporation, I was pressed to look at the PeopleSoft scorecard applications. It seems that they have a set of industry and role-based enterprise scorecards that come pre-configured with commonly used KPIs and metrics. The available scorecard dashboards include: Customer Scorecard, Healthcare Scorecard, Manufacturing Scorecard, Project Portfolio Management and Supplier Rating System. I’ll get a hold of sample screenshots to show you, but I thought I’d feature today a general dashboard screenshot that shows how a user can scan and navigate through a bunch of KPIs. The navigation is classical and driven via a left side menu. Once you click on KPI List, the KPIs show up on the lower part of the center panel. However, there is a bit of weirdness there. Look at the tabs. The second tab is a “More” tab where you see the rest of the kpis. I’ve never seen that before. Doesn’t seem so intuitive to me. Also, what is the top part of the center panel (where there is a graphic of what seems to be a particular kpi) and its relationship to the lower part of the center panel (the kpi list)? Does clicking on something in the bottom part drive the selection of the top part chart? Unclear to me.

Tags: Scorecard KPIs, Performance Metrics, Enteprise Dashboard Navigation.

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog