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Dashboard

From a simple excel dashboard to a fully integrated enterprise reporting suite, the Business Dashboard is being quickly adopted as the new face of Business Intelligence. It has a rapidly growing role in BI reporting and analysis.

An enterprise dashboard allows at-a-glance visualization of company health and monitoring of key performance indicators. Simple to understand and high in ROI, these executive dashboards are becoming "must-haves" for all enterprises. Easy-to-use by business users and fun-to-implement by the IT department, BI dashboard projects are quickly funded and politically popular.

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"Dashboards by Example" is a business intelligence blog dedicated to showing you actual examples of do's and don'ts of dashboard design. Study examples of enterprise dashboards, scorecards and other business intelligence interfaces implemented by the world's top organizations.

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How to Hold a Business Intelligence Dashboard Technology Bake-off

The best way to compare the relative merits of one dashboard platform to another is to build the same business intelligence dashboard in both technologies. That way, you get to experience the strengths and weaknesses of the various software products and technologies.

Now, to really get a sense of what each software product brings to the table, one should not merely try to replicate the dashboard pixel for pixel. Rather, start right from the beginning (remember that pesky user requirements phase?) and see if you can apply a unique solution to some of the data visualization challenges at hand. That way you can identify those unique value adds that certain platforms offer. Maybe one package is better at charting, or perhaps another is best at interactive controls.

The dashboard software vendors do this exercise all the time. Let’s take a look, for example, at the workflow that Robert Allison of SAS uses. Robert is a real pro at using SAS/GRAPH and has compared his platform against many others. He’ll often take a look at a dashboard example from another vendor and replicate it for competitive intelligence purposes.

Let’s first look at a typical target dashboard. Here is a dashboard from the Visual Mining NetCharts reporting platform:

NetCharts Dashboard

Netcharts Dashboard Example

The NetCharts dashboard is meant for use to track a fundraising effort. It has sections that measure metrics relevant to a non-profit organization:

Dollar Cost YTD
Cost to Raise a Dollar
Fundraising Event Calendar
Campaign Costs
Revenue Detail
Expense Detail

There is one big table, a couple of bar charts with line graph overlays, a gantt chart and a dial.

Now here is what Robert Allison did with SAS/GRAPH:

SAS Dashboard

SAS Graph Fundraiser dashboard example

Robert provides commentary on his exercise which you can read on his SAS fundraising dashboard summary. Here is a small excerpt of his thinking:

I started with data from examples on the iDashes website…
http://www.visualmining.com/developers/application-examples.shtml
And then tried to make a dashboard that was more functional
than theirs :) I have changed the data somewhat so that my
chart does not get into copyright infringement…

Since my schedule of fundraising events was kinda basic/simple,
and didn’t have any dependencies, I chose to represent it with a
clever bar chart rather than ‘proc gantt’ (also, you only need a
sas/graph license to do it with a bar chart, rather than needing
sas/or). The ‘clever’ part is that each event is really 2 bar
segments — an ‘invisible’ white one that extends from time=0
(ie, the dawn of sas time in 1960) and then the blue segment that
starts and stops at the begin and end time of the event.
The html charttips/flyover-text are particularly helpful here,
to see the dates of the event.

Thanks Robert for the peek at how you “test” out your platform/technology against others in the market place. We’ll look for more of your examples in future posts here.

Tags: Dashboard Technologies, Reporting Platform Comparison, Business Intelligence Bake Off, Dashboard Vendors, Dashboard Design, SAS/GRAPH, NetCharts Dashboards

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Last Modified: Thursday, October 4th, 2007 @ 11:14

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Dashboard Screenshots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Dashboards by Example Volume 1 Goals and Objectives

"Dashboards By Example - BI Dashboard Samples" is the theme and mission statement of this blog. We salute the Dashboard Spy in the field - those business users, project managers, IT executives, application designers, business intelligence experts, analysts, coders and subject matter experts who are on site creating this exciting and new "face of BI". Your business intelligence dashboard can go by many names - performance dashboard, executive dashboard, business dashboard, balanced scorecard, KPI metric summary, enterprise dashboard, bi dashboard, corporate dashboard. Whatever we call it, we believe that the at-a-glance visual approach is the key to user-centric design. Let's learn from each other's dashboard examples and continue to increase the level of usability and usefulness.

We strongly believe that the more dashboards you study, the more adept you will become at choosing correct design solutions for your company. "Learn by Example" is not just a motto - we take it literally, hence the name "Dashboards by Example". So take every chance you get to view examples of BI interfaces. As a matter of fact, take a second now, and study this dashboard example.

What's on your Dashboard?

The Dashboard Spy wants your dashboards!! I've collected over 1000 screenshots of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards for Volume 1 and now need you to send me the next 1000 dashboards for Volume 2. Email me at info at dashboardspy.com and tell me about your dashboard. Send me images, notes, technical details, business rules, metrics, KPIs, anything that you think your fellow Dashboard Spies will have an interest in. Keep this library of dashboarding resources going!

Also, I'd love more links to both the main Dashboard Spy site at http://dashboardspy.com and the Volume 1 blog of 1000 dashboards at http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com. I'd love your help in making these resources better known.

Looking forward to seeing your dashboards, The Dashboard Spy

P.S. Did you check out this free dashboard template for wireframing? Click on the image below for the download link and instructions. Consider it a gift for your unfailing support. Thank you very much. Sincerely, your friend in dashboarding, Dash.