Dashboard

SharePoint Dashboards are becoming more and more popular in corporations, especially with the increasing adoption of MicroSoft Office 2007. The latest release of SharePoint (Office SharePoint Server 2007) is packed with features and package integration points that make for powerful enterprise dashboards.

Today we look at a live demo of a SharePoint Dashboard built for a marketing team to track their marketing campaign metrics. The demo is well worth visiting, as is the Microsoft site it is hosted on - the SharePoint Community Portal.

Take a look at this screenshot of the SharePoint Communtiy Portal before we dive into the Marketing KPI Dashboard. As you see, it is a SharePoint resource that is built with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and features many SharePoint resource blogs and demo SharePoint dashboards. Note the welcome message where they proudly note that the SharePoint team “eats their own dogfood”.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: SharePoint Dashboard for Marketing Campaign Tracking ............

Dashboarders in general are not experts in professional graphic art tools such as Adobe Illustrator. They do know that the graphic artists on a dashboarding team seem to work wonders, however. So let’s lift a little of the magic away today and look at how dashboard pie charts are created using illustration tools.

What’s the big difference between business dashboards created in older versions of Microsoft Excel and the latest Excel 2007? Yes, there are feature upgrades and such, but the main difference is that of look and feel. The graphics have a fresh modern look with depth and polish. Can the underlying graphic work make such a difference. Yes!

Over on the Dashboard Spy main site, I posted a link to a great Adobe Illustrator post that explains how to create dashboard pie charts. Take a look at this dashboard post.

Here is a screenshot from the tutorial:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Creating Dashboard Pie Charts in Adobe Illustrator ............

Dashboarders have been reading the recent posts on the relative merits and faults of using pie charts on business dashboards and have sent in plenty of comments in defense of pie charts. A common note has been that if you add hover-over functionality to pie chart slices, they work fine for dashboards. Seems that people do love their pie charts.

Several avid dashboard pie chart lovers mentioned that Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius pie charts are clear to read because of the tool-tip type of descriptive text that pops up when you mouse over the pie sections. I personally think that it’s because the Xcelsius pie charts are so darn shiny that they like them, but whatever.

Here is a good example of an Xcelsius pie chart. I put the cursor over one of the pie chart slices to bring up the box with the exact value of the KPI.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Xcelsius Dashboard with Interactive Pie Charts ............

Dashboard

Topic: Dashboard software help pages and system documentation

Dashboard design teams spend a lot of time on the do’s and don’ts of data visualization best practices. In fact, things can get quite heated during kpi and metric selection battles. Or even over whether dials, gauges and other bells and whistles deserve to be on the business dashboard. As an example, take a look at this dashboarder name-calling session.

Unfortunately, nowhere near that amount of energy is ever spent on the help and documentation aspects of a dashboard application. Maybe it’s because the help pages and system documentation is naturally at the tail-end of software development projects, and we dashboarders are just worn out by then.

This is unfortunate, of course, because proper support and help is critical to a truly useful business dashboard. Remember, the users of dashboards are usually not technically oriented and need extra care to decipher system messages. For that matter, many users are not that aware of the finer points of the KPIs and Metrics used and need documentation as to the business implications of the dashboard content.

It really is too bad when shortcuts are taken in terms of a dashboard’s help pages. Take a look at this help screen:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Business Dashboard Help Pages ............

Performance Dashboard

Topic: Reading Program Metrics Tracking Dashboards

Executive Dashboards are now appearing regularly in the education sector as aids in various education, management and administrative efforts. Today on the Dashboard Spy we look at a Reading Program Dashboard.

At-a-glance, educators can track the progress of their reading programs at the district, school and student levels. In fact, the vendor of the dashboard software powering this dashboard advertises on their website that you can access the results of 100,000 reading quizzes.

Here is the screenshot of the dashboard:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Performance Dashboard Measures Reading Program KPIs ............

A dashboard means graphs. And, of course, graphs mean pie charts. Therefore dashboard means pie charts, doesn’t it? We all know and love the simple pie chart. Or do we? Is the pie chart really the best graph to place on our dashboards?

Dashboarding veteran Stephen Few issues some great warnings against using dashboard pie charts in his latest newsletter. The feature article entitled Save the Pies for Dessert explains why we dashboarders should not eat the pie.

Take a look at this excerpt. There is a great analysis of why line graphs are better than pie charts when comparing relative quantities:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Don’t Eat the Dashboard Pie Chart ............

Topic: Do’s and Don’ts of PowerPoint Presentations for Dashboarders.

PowerPoint Dashboards were the topic of discussion on our last featured dashboard, but you really have to be careful with not adding too many PowerPoint bells and whistles.

This is of course true for all PowerPoint presentations, but especially so for business intelligence projects.

Have you seen the hilarious PowerPoint presentation by comedian Don McMillan?

Here are a couple of screenshots of particular value to enterprise dashboard implementors:

This first one is where he discusses the inverse relationship of animations vs. effectiveness.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: How NOT to Dashboard in PowerPoint ............

Dashboard Spy readers never believe me when I tell them how many PowerPoint dashboards I see out in the field. Yes, that’s right - it’s not a mis-statement. I said Microsoft PowerPoint for enterprise dashboarding! Don’t believe me? Look within your own organization and I’m sure you’ll find project tracking, status reporting and other related task being done with Powerpoint. Believe it or not, I’ve even seen pharmaceutical marketing departments exchange data feeds with partner companies through powerpoints that contained embedded data tables!

Just because a dashboard is implemented in Powerpoint, however, don’t dismiss it as the output of someone who doesn’t know anything about executive dashboarding or enterprise reporting. It may be because of the installed user-base of powerpoint, the fact that you can distribute it as a powerpoint show (pps file) or simply the fact that most people are not intimidated by powerpoint, that it is being used.

For our dashboard example today, we take a look at this Powerpoint dashboard:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Project Status Dashboards in PowerPoint ............