Head over to the main dashboardspy.com site and check out this post on hospital management KPIs, if you want to view a really cool interactive flash presentation on hospital workflows and performance measurement. Definitely bookmark that post if you might become involved in an enterprise dashboard project for any sort of healthcare facility. See below for  a screenshot of the demo menu.

The demo is interactive and requires Flash to view. It is an easy way to get grounded in department workflows if you are just getting started on a business intelligence project involving a hospital or medical facility. The vendor did a great job on offering value in a sales tool.

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Dashboard Spy readers know that I am a nut for user interface design methodologies and best practices. Thanks to the efforts of a user experience designer at Microsoft, we have an insider’s look at the process used at Microsoft to design the look and feel of the graphs and charts of Excel 2007. Read the Excel 2007 Chart Design post at the Dashboard Spy for full details, but here is a quick screenshot of some of the designer’s output.

The image below shows his hand-drawn paper renditions of some excel charts and graphs.  They basically wireframe out the flow of choosing chart types and configuring their options. User interface designers often start with paper sketches before they move to a higher fidelity verison. It’s just easier and faster than changing the software based versions.

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It’s exciting news when you can get a peek at the executive dashboard of Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media fame. Tim, of course, is the publisher of what some people consider the best computer books ever written, and one of the true thought leaders of our time.

Mr. O’Reilly is a big fan of executive dashboards and uses one regularly to monitor and track trends in the publishing industry. Let’s jump right into his executive dashboard with this view of the book publisher landscape. Note the Hello Tim O’Reilly welcome message – yes, this is the real deal! His actual executive dashboard.

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Thank you to the Dashboard Spy reader who sent me this screenshot of a Project Management Dashboard used at Sprint to track their network systems project pipeline. This dashboard is circulated at the company via Microsoft Powerpoint.

There are the typical project stages of Define, Discover, Design, Develop and Deploy, but what I thought clever was the use of concentric circles to show the ranges of the LOE (Level of Effort – metrics that represent tasks and activities that fall within the realm of basic functions within one’s normal routine). Continue reading →

Those of you interested in Excel Dashboards should head over to the main Dashboard Spy site for this article on the Ingredients for Building Excel Dashboards.  There is some very good advice such as the suggestion to use a different color pallete for excel dashboarding. Thanks to Andreas FLockermann from BonaVista Systems for submitting his list of ingredients for successful excel dashboards.

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Head over to the main dashboardspy.com site for a post on the interactive demo of this mashup dashboard. Looks to be a flex-based type of enterprise dashboard. Definitely try it out. Here are a couple of screenshots of the dashboard. There is also a link to a site with hundreds of examples of mashup dashboards. Be sure to check out the top mashups at Programmable Web, because this is going to be a major influence on portal and dashboard design.

Gone are the days of trying to do it all yourself. Enrich your dashboard user’s experience by consuming web services and the APIs offerred by the community. It complements your data and your user will thank you.

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During the graphic design phase of your enterprise dashboard, who has final say over the look and feel? That’s a tough question. It’s always a big issue – whether you use an off-the-shelf dashboard software solution or custom-build the dashboard yourself. Granted, you have less design decisions to make if you use a vendor’s product, but with the increasing ability to “skin” the interface, you still have weighty graphic design considerations to make. Continue reading →

Dashboard Topic:

Microsoft Dashboard

The fields of Business Intelligence in general and Enterprise Dashboards in particular are moving at such a fast pace that it can be a challenge to keep track of each vendor’s latest products and the ever-changing marketing efforts for their BI offerrings. I’ve been involved in other technologies as of late, so I was surprised when I heard someone refer to Microsoft’s vertical industry-related business intelligence offerings by the name “Microsoft Dynamics”.

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Microsoft Office has grown to a point where its component toolset is robust enough to create some quite compelling executive dashboards.  Of course, MS Office is not just the collection of word/excel/powerpoint that we typically think of. The reason why we can now do some very sophisticated dashboarding with Office is that it now officially includes some big products like SharePoint, InfoPath, and Business Scorecard Manager. Of course, when you include heavyweight applications like those, you can definitely do some nice work in the enterprise dashboard space.

The best intro to the use of MS Office for dashboard purposes is found in this video on using Microsoft Office to create an IT governance executive dashboard.

I pulled out a couple of slides from the video because I found them interesting:

Here are some background/justification points on why a company needs IT Governance/IT Portfolio Management Processes and Monitoring:

Here are some executive dashboard screenshots. They should applications like sharepoint, infopath and business scorecard manager creating parts of cxo dashboards and business unit scorecards.