Dashboard

More executive dashboard screenshots from The Dashboard Guy (is imitation of dashboard screenshots the sincerest form of flattery? That’s a definite YES!!). These dashboard screens show some of the metrics that a wireless network provider would be interested in.

The first screen of this executive advisor dashboard shows network performance, resource utilization, usage levels and quality of service metrics.

The second enterprise dashboard shows the selection of reports by a dashboard user. Note the business measurements or KPIs that the user can choose.

The graphs themselves can also be configured:

Nice features on this executive dashboard.

Enterprise dashboarders who measure marketing metrics will be interested in going over to the main Dashboard Spy site at dashboardspy.com to read the commentary on these marketing dashboards:

Over at my main site dashboardspy.com, I answer the question of “What was the first executive dashboard?” No, the answer is not some experimental enterprise dashboard from IBM or the MIT research lab, the first one goes back much further than that. Head on over to the main site to see the answer as well as view some other executive dashboards that you may have missed.

See the post titled: LEO - the First Computer-based Business Dashboard.

Also, take a look at the first PC-based dashboard: The First Spreadsheet Dashboard Report.

BI Dashboard News: SAS dashboarder and long time Dashboard Spy, Robert Allison gives us a sneak peek at the upcoming dashboard-friendly features to be found in the next version of SAS (v9.2). Heavily influenced by the trend in business intelligence (BI) visualization towards graphically-rich KPI displays such as sliders, gauges, traffic-light icons and bullet graphs, the SAS dashboard programmer will be able to easily produce such visuals by simply passing parameters to the new functions.

The look and feel of the KPI graphics are clean and professional. They’ll add a nice look to your SAS dashboard for sure. The designs of the various gauges and sliders are thoughtful - for example, the round gauges clearly tell you what color state is indicated (big round color spot in the middle) as well as clearly indicating the actual numeric value of the indicator (bolded number on bottom). Likewise the sliders, dials and traffic lights indicate the state and values both graphically and numerically (a great help when printing to a black and white printer!).

Here is a look at the sample dashboard submitted by Robert:

As Dr. Allison explains:

Hello Dashboard Spy. Just wanted to submit a ”spy photo” of some new dashboarding functionality that will users will see in upcoming releases of SAS/Graph.  Based on strong customer demand for more / better / easier dashboarding KPI charts in SAS/Graph, SAS is adding a new Graph Procedure called “proc gkpi”.  Gkpi provides an easy parameter-driven way to produce very nice-looking gauges, slider bars, bullet graphs, and traffic lights.  In the past, users could do charts similar to these, but they had to write custom sas code using sas/graph the ‘annotate’ facility - now, all they have to do is run the gkpi procedure, and pass it some parameters!

I know, I know … gauges have lots of drawbacks in dashboards.  But hey, the other philosophy is “give the customer what they want” … and try to make it work as well as possible.  So, as far as gauges go, these are pretty decent — plus, the proc does several other useful kpi’s too (it’s a package deal)! 

To show off what the new gkpi procedure can do, a team of us created a dashboard which exclusively uses the new gkpi charts.  This dashboard layout was designed by Lee Sullivan, initially programmed by Kathleen Ramage, enhanced by Himesh Patel, and then Robert Allison (that’s me!) generalized the code and added chart tip & drilldown capability. I think it’s one of the sharper-looking dashboards I’ve seen.

Here is the direct link to the sample: http://robslink.com/SAS/democd26/kpidash.htm

Also, you can look on the bottom of my dashboard samples page to see the interactive version (with chart tips & drilldown), and get a copy of the sas code which I’m happy to share:  http://robslink.com/SAS/dashboards/aaaindex.htm

Tags: SAS Programming, SAS Dashboards, SAS/GRAPH, SAS 9.2, proc gkpi, gkpi, enterprise dashboards, robert allison, BI Dashboard, business intelligence dashboard, executive dashboards

Enterprise Dashboards are interesting to study because of the amazingly diverse ways of showing data. Yes, of course you don’t need a collection of dashboard screenshots to find data visualization samples to critique. You expert business intelligence types out there love to discuss data visualization approaches by focusing on specific charts and graphs. The rest of us business types, however, benefit greatly via the dashboard approach because of the context it provides. Let’s take a look at a marketing dashboard today that focuses on tracking lead generation provided through a marketing department’s activities.

Here is an interesting graphic approach to breaking down the results of marketing programs and tying the activities to the results. The enterprise dashboard follows:

The marketing dollars in this particular budget add up to a nice round $1 million because the dashboard designer plugged in dummy data. Nevertheless, it’s instructive to see how the marketing budget is decomposed:

• Marketing Activity / Percent of Budget
• Outbound Phone / 30%
• Email / 2%
• Website / 5%
• Direct Mail / 10%
• Seminars and Events / 15%
• Advertising / 10%
• Alliance Referrals / 5%
• Public Relations / 10%
• Other Activities  / 13%

The marketing ROI metrics used in this dashboard are: Budget, Inquiries, Cost per Inquiry, Percentage of Qualified Leads, Sales-ready Leads, Cost per lead, Close Rate, Number of Sales, Cost per Sale, Total number of sales, Average Size of Sale, Total Revenue and finally the overall Total Marketing Return on Investment.

The above dashboard was created for a CEO who was interested in investigating the contribution of the marketing team to the company’s sales revenue.  The dashboard was commissioned to tie the marketing and lead generation activities directly to sales revenue.

I like the funnel-effect of the data table.

Tags: Lead Generation Dashboard, Enterprise Dashboards, Executive Dashboards, Marketing Dashboard

Note for dashboarders interested in marketing metrics. This book was just discovered by some dashboard spies. It’s called Marketing and the Bottom Line: The Marketing Metrics to Pump Up Cash Flow. Click on the image to check it out at Amazon:

This executive dashboard screenshot features a very graphic approach to showing project status on a dashboard. It’s all about the state of the project, right? Well, if red, green and yellow lights are good, then really big red, green and yellow lights are even better! I like the design.

User interface design is so critical to the success of your enterprise dashboard. When I say success, I really mean the perception in the mind of your users. Who cares if you’ve done a complex SQL join to get the data on the dashboard? Not the users. They are about the size of the Key Performance Indicators and the shades of colors used to display the metrics.

Tags: Enterprise dashboard design

Marketing Dashboards quickly pay for themselves through their ability to surface key KPIs that show marketers the efficacy of their marketing programs. When marketing department enterprise dashboard users can be alerted to the campaigns that are producing the most and best sales leads and contacts, the prioritization of campaigns can be quickly accomplished.

Take a look at these two screenshots of a marketing dashboard implemented using an open source java/ajax dashboard framework called jwic.

The first dashboard shows your listing of marketing activities. You can enter the name of the activity, the dates, status, etc. The list view is on the top part of the screen while the activity detail portion is at the bottom of the dashboard. 

 This second screen is more interesting. After a campaign has been running, you can create a report to show the collected KPIs of the marketing program. At-a-glance, you see summaries of the marketing activity’s suspects, prospects, qualified prospects, short-term leads (0-3 months), mid-term leads (6-9 months), and longer-term leads (9+ months).

Generated opportunities and Sales KPIs are shown of course. The middle section shows the indicators for the all-important Opportunity Pipeline. There is an analysis section which provides tracking for success criteria such as Conversions of suspects to prospects, prospects to leads, and leads to sales. The cost of the marketing activities is key and you can see figures such as costs per qualified prospect, cost per lead, cost per sales, and return on investment of the marketing activity.

Homework: Have a look at the book called “Marketing by the Dashboard Light” - see the sidebar on the left for the link. It’s a great book that all marketers should read.