Dashboard

Business Intelligence Dashboards are often lavishly illustrated with bar graphs, pie charts and other graphics of metrics and KPIs. However, as you know, the plain old data table often makes an appearance on our dashboard interfaces.

How do we make these data tables intuitive to read?

Take a look at our post on the main Dashboard Spy site titled Intuitive Dashboard Design and see an example of how to optimize data tables for maximum understanding. It’s a great read.

Here’s a sample from the post:

Click on this post to find out how to optimize a data table like that one to make it intuitive for your dashboard users to understand the significance of the data: Intuitive Dashboard Design Using Preattentive Variables.

Here is a hint. It has to do with this graphic:

Tags: Optimizing Table Design in Business Intelligence Dashboards, BI Dashboard Data Tables

Enterprise Dashboard Topic: Where to place the executive dashboard - in the browser (rich internet application), in a fat client (.NET windows software) or on the PC desktop itself (Desktop Widget)?

In a recent Dashboard Spy discussion, we looked at some BI Desktop Widgets from the dashboarding lab over at Business Objects. This is a very exciting idea that effectively addresses one of the 3 Rules of Dashboarding - The Rule of Placement. Both Business Objects and Oracle have been experimenting with placing dashboards closer to the user, that is, right on their PC desktops. The idea is that you don’t even have to launch an application to monitor your KPIs and metrics.

Here is a further look at what Business Objects is doing with widgets. Over at their development site, they have launched a beta of Crystal Xcelsius Business Widgets for Salesforce.com.

Take a look at these dashboard widgets on the desktop:

As they explain in this pdf on the Business Widgets Beta, a business widget for salesforce.com is a mini-application that allows you to access data from salesforce.com without logging in and navigating to various metrics pages.

There are 10 business widgets for the salesforce.com CRM. Let’s take a closer look at the individual dashboard widgets:

The first is the Sales Revenue Tracker. Use it to track expected revenue, pipeline statistics and quarterly revenues achieved to date.

Click for the next business widget:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Dashboard Desktop Business Widgets for the Salesforce ............

Dashboard Spy readers know how much I am convinced that Microsoft Excel 2007 will be leading a new wave of dashboards across the corporate world. The new version of MS Excel is built from the ground up with tools for dashboarding. Remember this UI designer sketch I featured in a past post (How Microsoft Designed Excel 2007) that a Microsoftie Dashboard Spy sent me? Here’s a “before and after” set of images:

Already we’ve seen some great Excel 2007 dashboards from business-side power users. Keep them coming and I’ll show the rest of the Dashboard Spy readers.

Great news on the “books about Excel 2007 for Dashboards” front. Take a look at this book cover. Yep, a Dummies book on Excel 2007 Dashboarding! It’s officially called Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports. Coming soon to a book store near you, but you can pre-order now at a great price.

(click link for Amazon.com page)

Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies (Low Amazon Price of $16.49 plus Additional 5% Discount for Pre-Orders)

The best thing about this book is that it’s written by Dashboard Spy reader and data analysis guru Mike Alexander. He has authored 7 great books on advanced business analysis with Microsoft Excel and Access. Over the years, his company, DataPig Technologies has contributed greatly to the Excel community.

Check out the listing of Excel video tutorials and be sure to keep tabs on the new DataPig blog.

Mike has been kind enough to provide us with a sneek peek at his Excel 2007 Dashboarding book table of contents.

Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies
By Mike Alexander
Wiley Publishing
The goal of this book is to show you how to leverage Excel functionality to build and manage better reporting mechanisms. Each chapter in this book provides a comprehensive review of the technical and analytical concepts that help you create better reporting components - components that can be used for both dashboards and reports.  It’s important to note that this book isn’t a guide to visualizations or dashboarding best practices. While those are subjects worthy of their own book, this book focuses on understanding the technical aspects of using Excel’s various tools and functionality and applying them to reporting.

Part I:  Making the Move to Dashboards

Chapter 1: Getting in the Dashboard State of Mind
In Excel, the differences between building a dashboard and creating standard table-driven analyses is as great as the differences between California and New York. To approach a dashboarding project, you truly have to get into the dashboard state of mind. Dashboarding requires far more preparation than standard Excel analyses. It calls for closer communication with business leaders, stricter data modeling techniques, and the following of certain best practices. It’s beneficial to have a base familiarity with fundamental dashboarding concepts before venturing off into the mechanics of building a dashboard.  In chapter 1, you get a solid understanding of these basic dashboard concepts and design principles as well as what it takes to prepare for a dashboarding project.
Chapter 2: Building a Super Model
Although Excel is like the cool gym teacher that lets you do anything you want, a lack of structure in your data models can lead to some serious headaches in the long run.  Creating a poorly-designed data model can mean hours of manual labor maintaining and refreshing your reporting mechanisms. On the other hand, creating an effective model allows you to easily repeat monthly reporting processes without damaging your reports or your sanity.  The goal of this chapter 2 is to show you the concepts and techniques that help you build effective data models. In this chapter, you discover that creating a successful reporting mechanism requires more than slapping data onto a spreadsheet. Although you’ll discover how to build cool dashboard components in later chapters, they won’t do you any good if you can’t effectively manage your data models. On that note, let’s get started.

Part II:  Building Basic Dashboard Components

Chapter 3: The Pivotal Pivot Table

With pivot tables, you can build reporting models that can not only be easy to set up, but can be refreshed with a simple press of a button. This allows you to spend less time maintaining your dashboards and reports and more time doing other useful things. No utility is in the whole of Excel that allows you to achieve this efficient data model better than a pivot table.  In Chapter 3, you’ll not only get a concise introduction to pivot tables, but you’ll find some time-saving techniques to help create some useful pivot-driven views for your dashboards and reports.

Chapter 4: Excel Charts for the Uninitiated

Few mechanisms allow you to absorb data faster than a chart. Charts offer instant gratification, allowing users to immediately see relationships, point out differences, and observe trends. For those of you who have been uninitiated to the world of Excel 2007 charting, chapter 4 provides the basics of creating and customizing charts in Excel.

Chapter 5: The New World of Conditional Formatting
Microsoft has dramatically enhanced this functionality in Excel 2007. In Excel 2007, conditional formatting includes a more robust set of visualizations and predefined formatting rules. These enhancements allow you to quickly and easily build dashboard-style reporting that goes far beyond the traditional red, yellow, and green designations.  In chapter 5, you’re introduced to the new world of conditional formatting in Excel 2007, discovering how to leverage this functionality to enhance your dashboards and reports.

Chapter 6: The Art of Dynamic Labeling
Dynamic labeling is less a function in Excel than it is a concept. Dynamic labels are labels that change to correspond to the data you’re viewing. With dynamic labeling, you can interactively change the labeling of data, consolidate many pieces of information into one location, and easily add layers of analysis.  In chapter 6, you explore the various techniques that can be used to create dynamic labels.

Part III:  Building Advanced Dashboard Components

Chapter 7: Components that Show Trending

One of the most common concepts used in dashboards and reports is the concept of trending, or measuring of variance over some defined interval.  Trending provides a rational expectation of what might happen in the future. In chapter 7, you explore basic trending concepts and some of the advanced techniques you can use to take your trending components beyond simple line charts.

Chapter 8: Components that Group and Bucket Data

The benefit of grouping data is that it allows you to more easily pick out groups that fall outside the norm for your business. In this chapter, I explore some of the techniques you can use to create components that group and bucket data.

Chapter 9: Components that Display Performance against a Target
The business world is full of targets and goals. Your job is to find effective ways to represent performance against those targets. In this chapter 9, I explore some new and interesting ways to create components that show performance against a target.

Part IV:  Advanced Reporting Techniques

Chapter 10: Macro Charged Reporting

In chapter 10, I explain why you should use macros and how macros can help automate your recurring reporting processes to simplify your life.

Chapter 11:  Giving Users an Interactive Interface

Today, managers increasingly want to be empowered to switch from one view of data to another with a simple selection from a menu of choices. Fortunately, Excel offers tools that enable you to add interactivity into your reports. With these tools and a bit of creative data modeling, you can give your managers the choices they crave with relative ease.  In chapter 11, I show you how to incorporate menus, options, and selectors into your reporting mechanisms and offer a few useful examples you can implement into your processes.

Part V:  Working with the Outside World

Chapter 12: Using External Data in your Dashboards and Reports

When dealing with small datasets that are developed and maintained in Excel, you have to make a conscious effort to make that separation. However, in complex models where large volumes of data come from Access or SQL, the effort on your part is eliminated. The worry in these situations, however, is how to efficiently move that data from over there to over here. Chapter 12 explores the most efficient ways to get external data into Excel.

Chapter 13: Sharing Your Work with the Outside World

The focus of chapter 13 is on preparing your dashboards for life outside your PC. In this chapter, you explore the various methods of protecting your work from accidental and purposeful meddling and discover how you can distribute your dashboards via PowerPoint and PDF.

Part VI:  Parts of Ten

Chapter 14: Ten Chart Design Principles

Excel makes charting so simple, it’s often tempting to accept the charts it creates no matter how bad the default colors or settings are. But I’m here to implore you to turn away from the glitzy lure of the default settings. You can easily avoid charting fiascos by following a few basic design principles.  In chapter 14, I share with you a few of these principles and help you avoid some of the more common charting design mistakes.

Chapter 15:

Ten Questions to Ask Before Distributing Your Dashboard

You started this book with two chapters that discuss a few design and data modeling principles that, together, make up what could be considered dashboarding’s best practices. Before you send out your finished product, it’s valuable to check your reporting mechanism against some of the principles covered in this book. You can use the ten questions in this chapter as a kind of checklist to ensure your dashboard follows the best practices covered in this book.

Color Inserts

This book includes a full color gallery of some of the components you will find within the black and white pages of this book, plus a few sample dashboards you may be able to use as inspiration for your next reporting project.

Tags:  Excel 2007 Dashboard Book, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 for Dashboards & Reports

Update: The Dashboard Spy’s Big List of Dashboard Experts is now live! Be sure to visit if you like these sorts of resource listings.

Dashboard Spy readers are constantly sending me links to their favorite dashboarding, business intelligence and data visualization resources. I’ve been meaning to compile a Dashboard Spy Favorites List of these valuable sites, but have been holding off until I accumulate a large enough list. Imagine my delight when I came across the post 175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources. Talk about the ultimate list of info viz sites.

  (click to see the list) 

Written by the talented content maven (and Dashboard Spy reader!), Meryl K. Evans, it features carefully vetted data visualization related web sites categorized into the 3 groups of Examples, Blogs and Resources. I’m a bit upset at being beaten to the punch (just a little), but I certainly respect the quality of the list. Meryl told me she spent 3 solid weeks editing the links. Let’s help her maintain and grow this valuable resource.

Definitely visit Meryl’s list, but here’s a teaser sampling of some cool data visualization sites:

• Cool Infographics Poster Collection: Incredible posters with data visualization examples.
• Digg Labs: Visualizations used to track the latest news.
• Google Trends: Charts showing trends of Google searches.
• MedMaps: Medical MindMaps.
• Sesame Street on Visual Thinking: Teaching children to visualize shapes.

There’s 170 other links, so put on your thinking caps and explore!

Tags: Dashboarding resources, 175 Data Visualization Resources, Information Visualization, Info Viz Sites

Over at the main Dashboard Spy site, we featured a look at the topic of performance improvement in general and the role of performance dashboards in particular. Among other things, we looked at the following diagram from the process improvement and operational performance gurus over at mydials.com.

In this dashboarding forum, I wanted to show how one particular organization is striving to move along that third axis and improve their dashboard implementation process. I will point you to a series of project artifacts from the HR department of the Minnesota State Colleges & Universities system that are quite instructive. The idea is to leverage this group’s process for incorporating dashboard user feedback and improving the next dashboard release.

The dashboard we will use as the case study is known as the Human Resources Dashboard. It is an initiative sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor and that office really stressed the importance of using classical process improvement techniques to iterate through releases of the dashboard until users were satisfied.

Here is a screenshot of their page listing some key artifacts. You can visit the page at their HR Dashboards page. Take a look through the plans and worksheets. Also visit this HR Communications page for access to some great HR team newsletters.

For more information on using dashboards to measure internal communications, see the Klipfolio product.

Now let’s take a look at how they cultivated the continuous process improvement mindset throughout the lifecycle of the dashboard project: 

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Dashboard Implementation Process Improvement ............

Dashboard Topic: A quick 2 page brief that effectively serves as a “lazy man’s guide” to dashboarding courtesy of the U.S. Navy IT Department.

For a while now, I’ve noticed that The Dashboard Spy is avidly read by military IT staffers. Our log files show plenty of interest from .mil domains. Let’s hope it’s because our armed forces are embracing the power of using the dashboard design pattern as an effective business intelligence system interface, and not a mis-directed interest in the “Spy” part of our name. Gulp!

All kidding aside, to all you Dashboard Spy readers in our military forces (either currently serving or ex-military), I want to offer you a heart-felt “thank you” for your service.

What does all this have to do with dashboards? Well, I had the extreme pleasure of finding a nice mention of The Dashboard Spy’s collection of Dashboard Examples in a Navy IT magazine, of all places. For 25 years, The Department of the Navy Information Technology Magazine, “CHIPS”, has informed the entire military IT community of the latest developments in IT.

In this issue, I found a really great article on dashboarding. In fact, it’s the best introductory article I’ve found in a long time.
The author, Retired U.S. Airforce Major Dale Long, takes a light-hearted, but information-packed, look at digital dashboards. The title tells it all: The Lazy Person’s Guide to Digital Dashboards. Click on the link to download the pdf.

I wouldn’t be able to do justice in recapping the humorous style of the article, so here is a quick clip of a story that appears at the beginning of the article:

The article goes on to offer an excellent primer on digital dashboards. Take a look at this diagram which sums up the good design / bad design points discussed. Be sure to take a good look at the plug for The Dashboard Spy!

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Lazy Man Guide to Dashboards ............

Dashboard Topic: Operational Management Dashboards, Manufacturing Plant Dashboard

Thanks goes to the Dashboard Spy Reader who sent me the link to the pdf from Oracle titled Plant Manager’s Dashboard. This really helps out another Dashboard Spy reader who was recently assigned to a manufacturing plant analytics project.

The Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Plant Management Dashboard leverages data from the central ERP database and displays metrics for the following areas:

• Revenue Management
• Customer Shipment Performance
• Manufacturing Performance

Here’s a quick screengrab from the pdf, but page down for a listing of the operational metrics used.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Oracle JD Edwards Plant Management Dashboard ............

In the past, The Dashboard Spy has reported on various “Rules of Dashboards”. As best practices evolve in this space, we see articles promoting the latest set of rules to follow. We are happy to track and collect them for you. Let’s take a look at the latest such advice.

According to a recent article in CIO Today entitled The End Game for Business Intelligence, dashboards are the ultimate end product for unlocking the decades of Information Technology investments by linking corporate tools such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Business Intelligence and Data Analysis systems to the managers who can act on the information. But, the article goes on to say:

But as the interface between systems and business decisions, dashboards have to accommodate human behavior to add value. Consider a real-world marketing director in Dallas. He has no fewer than six dashboards to help him manage his performance. There’s the CRM dashboard, the financial dashboard, the PR dashboard, the advertising dashboard and so on. Each comes with its own username and password, and to access some he needs to launch a separate application. None of them get his undivided attention, and some of them are rarely used. In the end, the constraints under which the human is operating define the return on the system investment.

The author sketches out three main principles or “Rules” for dashboards:

The Rule of Placement

The concept here is that the ideal dashboard must be placed where it cannot be missed or ignored. While the writer agrees that stand-alone systems and web-applications are good, but the desktop itself is better. Yes, you heard it right, the PC desktop. For the longest time, The Dashboard Spy has been reporting on efforts of the dashboard vendors to work out solutions that allow business intelligence to appear directly on the desktop. Think widgets in Vista, or ribbons that span the top, side or bottoms of your wide screen displays.

See the following Dashboard Spy posts about these efforts:

Business Intelligence Dashboard Widgets from Business Objects (BI Desktop)

Oracle Fusion Desktop Widgets

Here is an excerpt of The Rule of Placement:

Dashboard Rule 1: Placement

The first characteristic most of us share on a computer is laziness. One economist has suggested that the only two traits common to all of us are laziness and greed. But that’s a bit dark for a dashboard article. Let’s call it busyness instead — as in, we’re busy doing other things. It’s safe to assume that the higher up you climb on the corporate ladder, the busier you become. The marketing director mentioned earlier simply does not have the time to launch and login to six different dashboards. This brings us to the first requirement of an ideal dashboard. It must appear where it cannot be missed or ignored. If you need to look for it, you won’t. This is the first rule of dashboards, the rule of placement.

Desktop dashboards are better

To get the most out of your systems and your people, your dashboard has to appear on their desktop. Stand alone applications and Web-based reporting are good but as the marketing director illustrates, once you have too many to manage they’re no good at all. The desktop is better. With the information that matters appearing on your desktop, you can maintain peripheral awareness of the important metrics without interrupting your workflow.

Make room for dashboard widgets

I can hear howls of disagreement from people who say that the first and last time they see their desktop is when they power up their system for the day. I’m one of them. On a regular work day the desktop is quickly buried under umpteen windows of email, spreadsheets, documents and Web pages. But the rule of placement works here too. Today’s flat panels and laptops can easily accommodate a desktop dashboard as a top bar, bottom bar, or side bar while leaving plenty of real estate for your daily applications. Look at a flat panel running a mini-dashboard alongside other applications and you’ll think panels were purpose-built for this arrangement. But the fact that your desktop dashboard must be small to be useful brings us to the second rule of dashboards: the rule of design.

The Rule of Design

The second rule for ensuring that business dashboards really work is the Rule of Design. Conveying information correctly, intuitively, and in a pleasing way is a challenge that even the best designers can struggle with. Partly a matter of deciding on the appropriate content in terms of which metrics and what types of charts, and partly a matter of observing (or trail-blazing) the correct visual design approaches, this skill set is finally developing as it needs to. Resources now exist to help you in this area. Look at the site you are currently on, for example, Dashboards By Example, the collection of business intelligence dashboard screenshots put together by The Dashboard Spy and the book Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. For an interesting story about the book see this Dashboard Spy post.

The Rule of Accuracy

Finally, the rule of placement and the rule of design point to a necessary third rule called The Rule of Accuracy. We all learn to pay attention to thing that prove to be reliable and ignore things that are just noise. Even if your dashboard is placed in a way such that you simply can’t ignore it, and design such that it is a joy to behold and use, you WILL NOT USE THE DASHBOARD IF IT GIVES YOU WRONG INFORMATION! It’s as simple as that.

Definitely go and read the article.

Tags: Dashboard Design, Principles of Dashboarding, 3 Rules for the Dashboard