Enterprise Dashboard Digest

Enterprise dashboard enthusiasts may not think the above headline very “punny”, but I could not help myself when I read the latest issue of noted dashboard guru Stephen Few’s Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter entitled Dashboard Confusion Revisited. In this excellent article, Mr. Few looks back on the confusion surrounding the definition of a “dashboard” and the clear definition he proposed at the time:

In March of 2004, three years ago exactly, my article titled “Dashboard Confusion” appeared in Intelligent Enterprise magazine. I wrote it because, at the time, I was concerned that the potential benefits of dashboards were being undermined by a great deal of confusion about what a dashboard was. The term “dashboard” needed a clear definition. In the article, I proposed a working definition in an attempt to reduce the confusion: “A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.”

Now, three years later, with the popularity of business intelligence dashboards exploding, Mr. Few is unhappy with that working definition. He feels that there is a definite difference between screens that monitor the state of things and screens that are used for data analysis. As he states,

Although many people have embraced this definition over the years, the term dashboard continues to be used in reference to almost any type of screen-based display that combines more than a single chart, no matter what its purpose. This not only creates confusion, but it also makes it impossible to say anything useful about dashboards. For instance, you cannot say anything about how dashboards ought to be designed without first specifying the purpose of the display. Displays that are used for monitoring what’s going on (dashboards) must be designed and must function quite differently than displays that are used to analyze data.

So, being the thought leader that he is, Mr. Few now proposes to differentiate the screens meant to analyze data by coining a new phrase – “Faceted Analytical Displays”.

Here we are now in March of 2007, three years from the release of my original article, and I am compelled once again to plead for clarity to end the confusion. The greatest clarification that is needed today is a distinction between dashboards, which are used for monitoring what’s going on, and displays that combine several charts on a screen for the purpose of analysis. Multi-chart analytical displays have tremendous potential, but they are very different in design and function from dashboards.

I would like to propose a unique name for them so we can discuss and promote them without confusion. I suggest that we call this a Faceted Analytical Display. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective “faceted” means “having a form which has many faces or aspects.” This perfectly describes the nature of these analytical displays, which combine several views of (or perspectives on) a common set of data to provide a rich display for analysis. Once again, in an effort to promote clarity and the basis for fruitful discussion, I would like to propose a definition: A “faceted analytical display” is a set of interactive charts (primarily graphs and tables) that simultaneously reside on a single screen, each of which presents a somewhat different view of a common dataset, and is used to analyze that information.

Thank you Stephen Few for another historical pronouncement. I’ve been working hard with a client on a “Faceted Analytical Display”, and I didn’t even know it!

Seriously, it’s this kind of thoughtful insight that Mr. Few so often brings to our industry. Be sure to subscribe to his wonderful newsletter.

Here is a sample Faceted Analytical Display provided by Mr. Few:

By the way, did you know that Few now offers his seminars to the public? He’ll be offering his famous data visualization courses to the general public for the first time this coming June. Until now, people could only attend these courses if their employer could gather enough participants for a private workshop, if they attended a conference where Mr. Few was teaching, or if they were part of the MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley. People who work for organizations that are too small to gather an adequate number of participants by themselves and have no interest in attending a larger conference have had no means to attend in the past, but now they do.  The 2007 West Coast Visual Business Intelligence Workshop will help people develop data analysis and presentation skills. Learn more about it at http://www.perceptualedge.com/workshops.php.

For those of you Dashboard Spy readers who don’t know Mr. Stephen Few, he is the author of the noted book: Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

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.

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

This enterprise dashboard is meant for use by public officials to facilitate their workflow. As you’ll recognize from the various webparts that you’ll see, it is driven by the Microsoft SharePoint platform. As a matter of fact, it’s one of those hard-to-track down business application templates provided by the Sharepoint team.  This dashboard illustrates the activities of a US senator. And, yes, before you ask, the resemblance to senator Hillary Clinton is coincidental, unless the Microsoft team is having a little fun with their dashboard design here!

The official name of this executive dashboard is “Public Official Activity and Issue Management”. The webparts shown are all lists of one sort or another. There are webparts for announcements, form letters (such as condolence, congratulation, service academy nominations, and thank-you letters), schedules, links, calls made, etc.  

Tags: Executive Dashboard, Public Official Dashboard, Enterprise Dashboard, Microsoft SharePoint Dashboard

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While rooting through my collection of thousands of screenshots of enterprise dashboards, I came across a printout of an excellent article on designing executive dashboards that I hadn’t read since 2003. I forgot how excellent it was. It took an information architecture approach that I thought really spot on.

As the author states:

The application of information design – Information Design teaches us that, in order to have the greatest impact and benefit, information must be relevant, clear and memorable. This provides an excellent framework for approaching the design problem of an executive dashboard.

He goes on to explore each area. I won’t repeat the information here. I’ll let you read it for yourself. I found a pdf on the web of the article itself – Executive Dashboards: An Information Design Approach.

Of value is also the exploration of the needs and wants of the executive using the dashboard:

In order to design a successful executive dashboard, we need to see the world through the eyes of an executive at a major corporation. Their job is a complicated one. Consider that they:

• Ultimately preside over many hundreds or thousands of employees and various business units and processes
• Regularly track key performance indicators and make major decisions that have varying degrees of impact on people in particular and the world in general
• Almost by definition are not able to have deep, intimate, granular knowledge of all vital data and information within their sphere of influence
• Must make decisions based on a cross-analysis of data and information that the people reporting to them may not be required or able to do themselves
• Are required to move quickly and decisively, setting strong leadership – particularly important in today’s fast-moving digital world

The role of the executive dashboard is to proactively anticipate and make easily available the data and information most important to the executive’s thought process and decision making in order to create broad efficiency and improve the quality of the decisions being made.

An excellent resource that withstands the test of the last few years. All enterprise dashboarders should go read it now.

Tags: Enteprise Dashboards, Information Architecture and Enterprise Dashboards, Enterprise Dashboard Article, Executive Dashboard Design

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Sharepoint Dashboards

Topic: Sample Dashboards using Microsoft SharePoint 2003
Dashboard Spy readers are anxious to see more of the SharePoint application templates. As you will recall, Microsoft has supplied over 30 sharepoint templates organized around business functions and departments. The problem has been that you must have your sharepoint administration install the templates before you can view them. Not so simple for us business types that just want to take a quick peek at the screenshot to get some ideas for our enterprise dashboards.

On this enterprise dashboard screenshot blog, we’ve been showing screenshots of this series of sharepoint templates. Here is the one for use as a Performance Evaluation dashboard. It has typical webparts such as document libraries, discussion boards, forms library, announcements, links, etc., but also an interesting webpart that shows the Organization Chart. And of course, it has webparts dedicated to performance reviews such as Peer Review, Personal Review, Employee to Manager Review, and Manager to Employee Review.

Tags: SharePoint Dashboard, Sharepoint 2003, Sharepoint templates, Sharepoint dashboards, Microsoft sharepoint, sharepoint application templates, Enterprise Dashboard Screenshot, Dashboard Design, Executive Dashboard, HR Dashboard, HR Review Dashboard, Employee Performance Dashboard

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.

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Security Threat Management Dashboard Update: This topic came up in a recent discussion with a Dashboard Spy about how insecure many applications are. This is the case in even the most security conscious environments. Take a look at the application security threats in a major financial company:

Dashboard Spy readers know that sometimes I can’t go into great detail of how particular dashboard screenshots get “liberated” for the enterprise dashboard community to examine. This dashboard comes into that category. I can tell you that it is from the information security department of one of the world’s leading financial companies. There isn’t anything earth-shattering about the layout or the metrics themselves, it is just that it is so rare to see actual metrics involving security threat incidents against a particular system.

In terms of the metrics, this enterprise dashboard includes: Privacy (reported incidents, resolved incidents), Threat Management (Forensic Investigations - active, new, closed, Intelligence – cyber threat incidents, Intrusion Detection – security tickets), Assessments (third party site assessments), Awareness & Education, and Issues Tracking (audits).

Thanks to the brave enterprise dashboard designer who sent me this dashboard screenshot.

Tags: Information Security Enterprise Dashboard, Dashboard Metrics, Dashboard Screenshot

 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 Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Enterprise dashboard implementation teams know that these business dashboards have always “mashed” together content from multiple sources. In fact, a big rationale for both enterprise dashboards and portals, is always the bringing together in a single view, content from sometimes far-flung systems across the enterprise.

What’s new in the current buzz about “mashups“, is the ease of bringing together content from target systems, both from your enterprise and from outside. This idea is not new (web services, syndicated feeds, sharing webparts in Sharepoint, etc), but this current ease of use (as seen in all those web 2.0 applications) is now making its way to enterprise dashboards.

The “Winter 07″ of salesforce.com has mashup capability as you see from this screenshot. I can tell right away that the salesforce.com dashboard now has some business objectcs xcelsius components. See this article about the salesforce.com mashup.

As soon as some Dashboard Spies get me some screenshots of their mash-dashes in action, I’ll post them here for all you other enterprise dashboard fanatics.

Tags: Mash Dash, enterprise dashboard, enterprise dashboards 2.0, dashboard design, business, enterprise mashup, business intelligence

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 Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Enterprise dashboards are very effective for monitoring various computer security-related tasks. Here is an effective management dashboard for keeping track of machine patches for an identified security threat. There are three possible conditions – Patched (machine is up to date with all applicable published security bulletins), Unpatched (machine either requires patching or a reboot for an applied patch) or Patch Not Needed (not necessary for this machine). This dashboard uses the new conditional background formatting of Excel 2007. The dashboard shown below is part of the Security Update Manager which is Enterprise Configuration Manager’s (ECM) patch assessment and verification module.

Tags: Security Management Dashboard, Enterprise Dashboard, Executive Dashboard, Business Intelligence Dashboard, Dashboard Design, Excel 2007 Conditional Formatting Dashboard

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

An enterprise dashboard for event coordinators. That’s the goal of this SharePoint template. Continuing on our tour of the business templates provided by Microsoft for SharePoint, here is a screenshot of the Event Coordination dashboard. You’ll see that it’s a wide template with room for lots of webparts chosen for mostly listing-related functionality. Webparts include Event description, task list, updates, vendor rolodex, event forms and templates, budget, invitee list, event feedback, discussions, and links. Following the screenshot of the main dashboard is a look at the Add a new event functionality. As you can see, the add item functionality is straight out-of-the-box sharepoint.

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 Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

Update: Due to a reader request, we’re going to search for dentist dashboards. Seems like dental practice management is a growing niche. Dentists need to manage their practices with dashboards as well.

Enterprise dashboards have become a key tool in the area of quality control in the food processing industry. Food processing facilities must take very seriously the information generated during processing. Areas such as quality control, food safety, and production techniques are constantly monitored and the resulting information must be leveraged properly to provide the facility manager with a close sense of the plant’s quality. Here we have a couple of screenshots used by a food processing company to monitor the process of making meat pies. Now I know that while Otto von Bismarck advised sausage lovers against watching the actual sausage-making process, lest they lose their love for the product, there is no doubt, that every food producer should carefully watch every single process in their plants. Hopefully with an enterprise dashboard, so that proper analysis can be made.

If you want to learn more about the area of Quality Assurance for the food industry, check this great google resource.

The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence Dashboards Blog

SharePoint is becoming a real contender when it comes to platforms for building business dashboards. Did you know that Microsoft SharePoint now holds 10% of the portal market? In speaking with an enterprise dashboard project manager, I realized that many people don’t realize that Microsoft released a bunch of preconfigured SharePoint site templates meant to address various business departmental needs. There are over 30 such demo sites. The problem is that these sites are not hosted by Microsoft on the web so that enterprise dashboard afficionadoes can play with them. They are offerred for download at the Sharepoint Community Portal, but you have to install them into your Sharepoint environment to play with them.

I’ve done so and am impressed with them. I’ll be taking screenshots of some of the more interesting executive dashboards and share them with you Dashboard Spy readers.

Here is the Competitive Intelligence Dashboard template. Sharepoint parts dedicated to competitive intelligence needs include document libraries such as Competitor, Industry, Sales Tools, PR Tools, etc. I’ve included a screenshot below of one of the document libraries:

Here is the document library screenshot. It is shown partly populated by sales tools such as white papers and case studies.

Note: If the IT department has Sharepoint installed at your company, it most probably is still Sharepoint 2003. If you are new to Sharepoint, the best book for learning that version is Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft SharePoint 2003 in 10 Minutes (Sams Teach Yourself). If you are lucky enough to have the Sharepoint 2007 version, be aware that things have changed significantly. Start with Microsoft SharePoint 2007 For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

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