On a recent business intelligence dashboard project, I had the luxury of designing for a dual monitor / large resolution screen size environment. The client, one of the world’s biggest financial companies, needed a performance dashboard for their brokers. Each broker had a dual monitor setup with 1600 resolution on each screen. Talk about a nice amount of screen real estate for an enterprise dashboard!

Speaking of large dashboards, I invite you over to the post on this dashboard on the main Dashboard Spy site. We’ll take a Dashboard Spy field trip together to view this really big dashboard:

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Balanced Scorecard, Enterprise Dashboard, Management Portal, Executive KPIs – we’ve all seen business intelligence terms like these used in a haphazard, interchangeable manner. Confusion arises when the same syntax is used by both business intelligence generalists and specialists.

When a management consultant says “Balanced Scorecard”, he or she usually means it literally – that is, in reference to the perfomance measurement discipline introduced in 1992 by Robert S. Kaplan and David Norton, used to measure a company’s activities in terms of its impact on vision and strategy.

When a business manager uses the term “scorecard” (note the lower case!), he or she may mean it in more of a general case – that is, in reference to a KPI dashboard or other less formal performance measurement dashboard. Continue reading →

Who says that web analytics dashboards all look the same? Here is a real-life, physical dashboard that was found near the elevator banks of the IT department of one of the world’s leading sales organizations. This one is a real gem. It was snapped by a passing Dashboard Spy.

As you can see, it is a business intelligence dashboard that tracks the metrics of the sales leads generated by the company’s website. At first glance, it looks like a dashboard screenshot with an annotation overlaid on top – typical of the output often used by an enterprise dashboard team to brag about the value of its dashboard. But take a closer look (the second photo is a closeup) and you will see that this is a physical item, created on a poster board.

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I think I’ve invented a new game for you and your enterprise dashboard team. I call it Six Degrees of Dashboarding. The objective is to find connections between dashboards. Of course, finding connections between data elements is what dashboarding is all about. You call it business intelligence. So you should be good at this game, no?

I’ll go first. What does the highway traffic dashboard from the Virginia Department of Transportation have to do with the famous virtual dashboard from the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report?

Take a look at the VDOT Dashboard:

(Also, see the original Dashboard Spy post on this traffic dashboard from the VDOT)

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