Dashboard

Excel Dashboard

Topic: Creating a Bullet Chart in Excel

Thanks to a Dashboard Spy reader, we have this excellent video tutorial with step-by-step instructions on building bullet graphs for your Microsoft Excel dashboard. Mike Alexander of DataPig Technologies, a real Excel and Access guru with 7 published books to his credit, kindly provided this Excel Bullet Chart video.

Bullet graphs were developed and championed by Stephen Few, whom we mentioned fairly often on The Dashboard Spy, as an efficient way to convey information in a small space. Long known for his aversion to graphically-rich, but functionally-poor gauges, dials and such, Stephen suggests bullet graphs as excellent replacements on business intelligence dashboards.

Here are some screenshots of the video by Mike, who has done a really superb job on this video. Of course, these are just screenshots, so please check out the excel bullet graph video itself at the above link.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Build Excel Bullet Graphs for your Dashboard ............

A Human Capital Dashboard addresses what was deemed a weakness in HR measurements - that companies gather human resource metrics but don’t use them strategically. A 2004 survey of senior executives, managers and HR professionals showed a wide gap between HR KPI collection and the use of that information as a management tool. See Human Capital Metrics: Most Users are Missing the Point.

Enterprise Dashboards, of course, are excellent in providing actionable business intelligence and are tools used to bridge gaps such as these.

Thanks to a Dashboard Spy over at Inverra, a consulting company with a focus on performance dashboards and scorcards, we get this great live demo of an Xcelsius Human Capital Dashboard. It really works hard to address that gap between knowledge and action by providing human capital metrics that are grouped in an intuitive and helpful way. Let’s start by looking at the screenshot of the dashboard:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Human Capital Dashboard Tracks Strategic HR Metrics Using Xcelsius ............

Salesforce.com has evolved from a CRM application service to an application platform that can host third party provided functionality. AppExchange is where external developers can create add-on applications that link into the main system. This has become a popular way for users to extend the functionality. There are over 600 apps available, many of which take the form of dashboards. Today we look at a couple of dashboard screenshots that focus on sales performance and sales commission measurement.

To start off, here is a screenshot of Lucidic’s Sales Performance Manager Dashboard:

You can see that it is very straight-forward from the excel-style dashboard school.
» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Salesforce.com Dashboard for Sales Performance and Commission Metrics ............

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:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Is My Dashboard Bigger than Your Dashboard? ............

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. » Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: George Bush on Business Intelligence ............

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.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Physical Dashboard for Tracking Web Marketing Metrics ............

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)

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Six Degrees of Dashboarding ............