Dashboard Topic: Demo of an Excel Dashboard for Hospital Bed Management.

Strategic management of hospital beds has become a high-pressure requirement in today’s world of health care facilities needing to do more with less resources. Like it or not, hospitals make money by determining the “right” kind of patients, procedures and getting the occupany and turn-over rates right. Yes, it seems cold-hearted, but strategic management of resources such as beds is what drives the profitability of health-care facilities.

Now, in defense of hospitals, I recently had the experience of bringing someone with an arm injury to the emergency room. This person was concerned because of her lack of health insurance. While checking in, however, the nurse and the admissions clerk both, in separate conversations, reassured us that they do not turn away people who need care. In fact they pointed out a sign posted in a prominent location that they do not turn away people because of an inability to pay.

Now, back to excel dashboards. Today we have the opportunity not only to look at screenshots of an excel dashboard for the management of hospital bed metrics, but, thanks to qimacros.com, you can actually download a working Excel worksheet for use as a hospital bed management dashboard system. Here is a screengrab of the goals and objectives of their bed dashboard system. I screen captured this page from their bed management demo video:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Excel Dashboard for Hospital Bed Management ............

Update: Xcelsius 2008 Dashboard example

ALso, this post on Designing Dashboard Alerts has become very popular. Be sure to check it out.

Dashboard

Topic: Project Health Dashboards

Dashboards are best experienced through working demos. Well, actually, they are best experienced as a regular user on the actual implementation, but let’s assume you can’t get someone to grant you hands-on-the-keyboard access. Most of the time on this blog when we discuss business dashboards, we have to settle with screenshots and descriptions. Sometimes, however, a Dashboard Spy reader will lead us to a working prototype or demo so that we can experience the interactivity of the system first hand. This is especially critical with the current generation of rich interface applications.

Today, courtesy of Inverra.com, we look at a demo of a Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius dashboard. This dashboard was implemented for the project management staff at a large company to check on the in-flight status and health of their projects. Here is the link to the project management dashboard demo and here is a screenshot:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Xcelsius Dashboard - Project Management ............

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:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Reasons for Adoption of Dashboards, Scorecards & Performance Alerts ............

Dashboard Hot Topic: Must-Read Business Intelligence Vendor Landscape White Paper Ranks Top 5 BI Tool Vendors: Business Objects, SAS, Cognos, Microsoft, Hyperion.

For more dashboard whitepapers such as this, use these white paper resource links: Business Trade Magazines  |   Business Intelligence White Papers.

Business intelligence dashboarders should immediately read the recently released paper (report dated July 2007 based on 2004-2006 data) written by IDC entitled “Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2006 Vendor Share“.

In addition to reviewing the “state of the union” in terms of BI tools and vendors, this excellent report offers some very interesting insight as to the ongoing adoption of business intelligence and dashboards by business users.

As defined by IDC, BI tools such as Dashboards belong to the query/reporting/analysis branch of the business intelligence tools section of the larger family of tools known as performance management tools and applications.

Here is a very interesting view of the taxonomy of business analytics software as seen by IDC:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: 5 Top Business Intelligence Tool Vendors According to IDC ............

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:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Dashboard Bar Graphs from the Hyperion Enterprise Metrics Module ............

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:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Security Operations Center Dashboard ............