Dashboard

Workforce metrics and KPIs of interest to a company’s human resources department were the focus of the previous post. In particular, we listed many human capital metrics by category. For today, I promised a link to an interactive HR dashboard demo, so here is a Workforce Analytics dashboard done in Crystal Xcelsius.

This interactive demo of a Workforce Analytics Dashboard is courtesy of Inverra. As our Dashboard Spy in that company told us:

This workforce dashboard was developed through a series of meetings with the SVP of HR and his business counterparts.  The dashboard was used to highlight specific demographic trends and spur discussion on what action the company should take to address them.  Of particular interest to the execs was the capability to quickly compare workforce metrics across both geographic and role-based views. 

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Xcelsius Dashboard for Workforce Analytics ............

A Dashboard Spy reader who works for the human resources department of a state government wrote me to discuss the best ways to show Human Capital metrics on an excel dashboard she was planning. I encouraged her to share her final dashboard when she completes it, but in the meanwhile, she sent me a collection of human capital metrics that might help anyone else with an HR dashboard project.

The following table lists the metrics studied at her office by category (or theme):

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Human Capital Metrics Dashboard ............

Dashboard Spy reader submissions of dashboard examples are certainly of a wide range of topics and implementation styles. Because of the many interests of the readership, we get alerted to dashboards that appear all over the world. Thanks to Derek G., we have a most interesting dashboard from the BBC News.

We dashboard designers are always looking for compelling ways to show dynamically changing metrics and KPIs. When we can devise a way to use the changing data to create a “sticky” and interesting interface, we really can impress the users.

As our Dashboard Spy in the field said in his email:

In case you haven’t seen it yet, there is an interesting new dashboard being
used on the BBC News website to show most popular stories. You can access
it here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/live_stats/html/map.stm

I thought it might be worth covering on your site.

Well, this certainly is an interesting dashboard. Take a look at the following 2 screenshots. The first one shows the most popular stories on the BBC News Site. What you can’t tell from the first dashboard screenshot (but you can see on the second dashboard of the most emailed stories), is that the left side list dynamically re-orders itself every few seconds.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: BBC News Most Popular Stories Ranked on this Dynamic Dashboard ............

Executive Dashboards must above all deliver actionable information. That is, after all, the goal of the executive using the dashboard - “Show me what actions to take to optimize my business”.

The challenge for us executive dashboard designers is how to create a dashboard that meets these goals.

The other day we viewed a video on Avinash Kaushik discussing analytics dashboards. That post had some great information on the do’s and don’ts of dashboard design, but there was much more that I wanted to present but couldn’t due to space contraints. So in this post, we’ll take a further look at some sage dashboarding advice.

Avinash has this page on Create High Impact Actionable Executive Dashboards that we should all read.

Here’s a screenshot of the his amazon page. My screenshot doesn’t show the explanation of the rules themselves, so you’ll have to visit the page.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: 5 Rules to Creating High Impact Actionable Executive Dashboards According... ............

Selecting the correct KPIs and metrics to place on your dashboard is arguably the most important phase of a enterprise dashboard project. All too often, in its rush to step along the software development life cycle as quickly and painlessly as possible, the IT department and project sponsors don’t give enough time for the business subject matter experts to think about the best metrics to create dashboard charts, tables and alerts for.

This point came to mind as some Dashboard Spies and I watched a video by Avinash Kaushik, a big figure in the world of web analytics. If you don’t know this very talented man, please check out his blog on web analytics called Occam’s Razor. Lately he’s been talking about the idea of Web Analytics 2.0, but that is another topic (listen to his podcast on Traditional Web Analytics is Dead). Oh, heck, here’s a recent screengrab to whet your interest (and I might as well reveal the punchline - Web 2.0 leads you to understanding by examing Clickstream, Multiple Outcomes Analysis, Experimentation and Testing, Voice of the Customer, Competitive Intelligence and Insights. Here is the diagram:

Back to our dashboarding topic, here is the screenshot and link to the video about Customer Centric Web Decision Making, in which he posits the controversial idea that traditional web analytics is dead. He shows a dashboard-like slide with what he calls 8 x 6 x gazillion metrics:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Web Analytics - The Avinash Gazillion Metrics Dashboard ............

Dashboard Spy reader and seasoned IT consultant Pete Brown, who I’ve come to think of as “Dashboard Pete”, has provided us dashboarding enthusiasts with a powerful PowerPoint template to use when we want to structure a presentation in the dashboard style.

Recent posts have explored the growing use of dashboard-style navigation in PowerPoint. See Using PowerPoint as a Presentation Dashboard over on the main Dashboard Spy site. Also, we spoke recently of how many dashboards themselves rely on PowerPoint as a distribution method. See Project Status Dashboards in PowerPoint.

The iDash template (take a look below at the cell phone navigation gadget for the inspiration of the name) will allow you to easily navigate between sections of the presentation through the use of a small icon dashboard. Here is a screenshot:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: iDash PowerPoint Template for Dashboard Style Presentations ............

Update: If you need a quick path to Microsoft Excel dashboards, consider these Excel Dashboard Templates from ExcelUser. They are plug and play, pure Excel worksheets. Just point them to your data source.

It’s not often that you get to look over the shoulder of a talented information visualization expert while he builds an Excel spreadsheet. Jorge Camoes’ post entitled How to Create a Dashboard in Excel allows us to do exactly that.

As Mr. Camoes wrote to me:

Just wanted to tell you about a dashboard I posted in my blog, the “Demographic Dashboard”. It is a fully functional Excel 2003 dashboard that uses population data from the US Census Bureau to show growth and age structures for each country around the world.

With this dashboard I wanted to show that an average Excel user can design a dashboard that fits the needs of his small/non-profit organization for data monitoring. I also tried to follow some visualization best practices (no gauges, no speedometers…).

Hope you can find it interesting.

Take a quick look at this Excel dashboard and you’ll agree that “interesting” is an understatement:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: A Look at Building Dashboards in Excel ............

New information visualization techniques tend to be adopted slowly. When something innovative hits the mainstream, it is most certainly worth noting, because, sooner or later, your dashboard users are going to say to you, “How about that information gadget I saw in the New York Times?”.

Today, let’s all go and try out an interactive application on the New York Times site: An Analysis of the 34,000 Words in the State of the Union Address.

Here is a screenshot of this incredible application. Note the use of the heat-map style where the size of the graphic denotes the relative weight of the occurances. We’ve noted the use of such information visualization techniques before on dashboards.

Tags: New York Times Interactive Analysis of the 34,00 State of the Union Address Words Delivered by George Bush, Heatmap dashboards, Information Visualization