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Lazy Man Guide to Dashboards

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.

CHIPS Magazine Cover Navy IT Magazine Dashboard Article

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.

lazy dashboarder guide

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:

humorous article on business dashboards

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!

elements of design for business dashboards

That’s a great graphic to share with your business dashboard users.

Here’s a text version:

The keys to creating and using dashboards are:

Good Design vs. Bad Design

  • Simple visual presentation vs. Eye-charts
  • Automatic data collection vs. Manual data entry
  • Easy identification of trends vs. No forecasting
  • Shared Data vs. Exclusive data
  • Content is relevant vs. Content is standard for everyone
  • Drill down to detail level vs. Too much detail on the top layer

Be sure to download the pdf and pass it around. What an amazing amount of information jammed into 2 pages. Yes, this is the Lazy Man’s Guide to Dashboards.

Tags: Dashboard article, US Navy Dashboards, Business Intelligence Dashboard Brief

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One Response to “Lazy Man Guide to Dashboards”

  1. links for 2008-01-18 — dougmcclure.net Said on January 17th, 2008 at 11:21 pm quote

    [...] Lazy Man Guide to Dashboards 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. (tags: dashboards design visualization bestpractices) [...]

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Last Modified: Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 @ 19:32

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