For more Business Intelligence Dashboard Examples, use this link to the Dashboard Spy sitemap: Dashboard

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.

Dashboards by Example Sponsors

"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.

Looking for a particular dashboard? Try these listings of BI dashboards (call them what you want):

Dashboards Page 1
Dashboards Page 2
Dashboard Page 3
Dashboard Page 4
Dashboard Page 5
Dashboard Page 6
Dashboard Page 7

Search Dashboards

This dashboard screenshot blog is part of the Dashboard Spy network - a unique collection of business intelligence resources. Send us your Dashboards!

Email the Dashboard Spy

RSS Feed

Subscribe to Feed

Navigate

Enterprise Dashboard Advertisements

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.

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:

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

Was this enterprise dashboard interesting enough to share? Help spread the news about Dashboards By Example. Click on the "Share" icon above to submit this post to your social bookmark service or email the link to a fellow dashboarder or even yourself.

What do you think about this dashboard post? Please leave a comment. Your opinions are valuable to the entire business dashboarding community.

One Response to “Lazy Man Guide to Dashboards”

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) [...]

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

This business intelligence dashboard blog entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 7:23 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.

Want to see a different randomly selected business intelligence dashboard example? Click here to view another Digital Dashboard from the Dashboard Spy.

Dashboard Spy Readers: See these related Business Intelligence Dashboard posts:

Latest posts of interest to the business intelligence dashboarding community - Have you read these recent enterprise dashboard posts?

Recently Posted

More Dashboards

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.