Dashboard Spy readers know my passion for dashboards and their growing role in presenting corporate metrics and KPIs. After all, I’ve collected and blogged about over a thousand dashboard examples. I truly believe that the dashboard is the new face of business intelligence. Their ease of use and user-centered design really makes information digestible and actionable.

Dashboards are rapidly becoming ubiquitous throughout the enterprise.

However, even I will admit that there are some places we should not take dashboard technology, no matter how strongly we want to promote the role of dashboards in business technology.

Startled by this claim? So, am I. Until a recent visit to one of the world’s top financial firms, I was convinced that dashboards should be distributed to every nook and cranny of the enterprise. There shouldn’t be a single spot in the building that employees can’t check on their metrics, right?

Well, let’s start off with this snapshot I took. It starts off innocently enough. I spotted this clever physical, real-world dashboard in the hallway near the break room. It’s a collection of sheets summarizing the performance of various business units. The pages are set into plastic containers so that you help yourself to a report of interest to you:

Not so strange. Kind of nice actually. As you walk by, you can grab a page to view the metrics you are interested in. As you see, there are 2 spots that contained content more popular than the rest. That’s interesting feedback.

Turns out, however, that this isn’t the only place one finds these dashboards. Take a look at these photos:

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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

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Digital dashboard designers today take a lot for granted. By that I mean they assume that their users have access to broadband speeds as well as modern browsers.

Remember when such assumptions certainly could NOT be made? Back in the day, website designers offered text versions of even simple web pages.

Have you ever heard of offerring both a full (rich interface) and text version of a digital dashboard?

That brings us to today’s

digital dashboard

example. Did you know that in the U.S., all 50 states and the District of Columbia jointly run a collaborative dashboard that tracks the nation’s cyber security status? The Department of Homeland security recognizes the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) as the national center for the states to coordinate cyber readiness and response. Below is just a screenshot of the dashboard, so use this link to take a look at their nifty flash-based cyber security digital dashboard.

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