Dashboard Spy Update: Dear readers – sorry for the wrong URL for the “Keeping Score Survey” pdf. I’ve fixed the link. See below:

Once a business intelligence project gets underway, there is a flurry of analysis, design, construction and testing. We get so busy that we sometimes lose sight as to the reasons why we adopt our dashboards, scorecards and performance alerting systems in the first place.

Let’s take a step back and look at the reasons behind the trend of the last few years toward enterprise dashboards, executive scorecards and other performance measuring applications.

In September of 2006, the Ventana Research Operational Performance Management practice group released a survey exploring what the reasons for adoption of dashboards and scorecards were for 590 participants: Dashboard & Scorecards Reasons for Adoption.

Take a look at these images:

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Dashboard designers in the early stages of an Hyperion System 9 BI project emailed me asking my opinion of the use of bar graphs to show the relative values of a certain measure. After they declined several suggestions of mine that worked well on similar business dashboards, they sent me a couple of screenshots of the types of visual metrics and charts that come with the Hyperion Enterprise Metrics module.

I took a look at their Enterprise Metrics library and learned that it is a collection of prebuilt KPIs and visualizations that can effectively show data relationships in Hyperion dashboards.

The screenshot of the bar charts they were interested in looks like this:

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Dashboard Topic: Security Management Dashboards

Enterprise dashboards are now quite popular in the area of Security Information Management. Reporting of incidents and threats are commonly surfaced via the dashboard format. The Dashboard Spy has reported on several security management dashboards such this application security dashboard.

Today we look at threat management, not at an application level, but on the enterprise level. Thanks to an avid Dashboard Spy reader who is also an expert at security information management systems, we have a sneak peek at the screens of a not-yet-released Security Operations Center Dashboard. These screenshots show how a dashboard and portal approach facilitates the various management tasks central to a security operations center.

That Dashboard Spy notes that while there are security information management tools such as ArcSight, Intellitactics and CiscoWorks, they don’t handle the business aspects of an Security Operations Center (SOC) organization. To address that market gap, there is a new product on the horizon called the Ops Soft Portal (www.opssoft.com) that serves as an adjunct to SIM tools by providing collaboration, workflow, publishing, reporting, tracking and dashboard capabilities.

Here is a look at the OpsSoft Portal Dashboard:

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