Topic: Project Management Dashboards

Is Google planning to become a viable choice for business dashboards? Google has just made available a compelling, no cost, product of great interest to the business intelligence dashboard community. Google Sites is a “suite of products for improving communication and collaboration”. It’s basically a wiki-type of Web 2.0 application that has several page layouts including a dashboard-type page. The Google Sites product is available to you if you use Google Apps (and you should as we demonstrated the power of web-based dashboard portlets powered by Google Spreadsheets in this Dashboard Spy video tutorial on coding simple html dashboard portlets.

Check out Google Apps through this Google Apps Video Tour.

Now let’s take a look at a Google Sites example of a dashboard layout. This is a mockup from Google that shows how you would use the Google Sites Dashboard Layout for a project management dashboard. Note that the link brings up a live dashboard example, so be sure to visit. You can always “leverage” the html code for a similar dashboard layout! In any case, you should click around any check out this project management dashboard example for ideas.

I grabbed a couple of screenshots for you, but have a visit to the dashboard. Here is the main project dashboard and the team profile page. See the rest of this post for the additional dashboard screenshots.

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Dashboards by Example recently focused on mobile business intelligence dashboards with the post on Cognos Mobile Dashboards. We looked at Cognos Report access via Window Mobile, RIM Blackberry and Symbian devices. Today we continue our examination of the state of the art in Mobile BI by looking at how Business Objects offers mobile access to its Web Intelligence reports.

Let’s give the research folks at the Business Objects Lab their due by looking at some of their diagrams of their mobile dashboards. They call the platform MoBI. The Business Objects team is proud of pointing out that their mobile dashboard offering uses J2ME to integrate with BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and other mobile platforms. In particular, they stress that their solution offers write-back capability that allows for user updates to information in the BI platform from the mobile device – “something that the view-only Go! Mobile solution from Cognos doesn’t do”.

Hmmm. Is that the gauntlet getting thrown down? Are we in for a battle of features on the mobile dashboarding front? Let’s hope so as dashboard users only stand to benefit.

Here are the diagrams from Business Objects:

I’m on the hunt for some MoBI screenshots, but in the mean time, let’s look at some more details:

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The idea of “Business Intelligence On the Go” relies squarely on the business dashboard. The ability to convey big ideas in a small space makes the dashboard, specifically the small portlets or widgets contained in dashboards, the perfect vehicle to provide business metrics to people on the go. The problem has been the platforms that these tiny dashboards can be distributed to. After years of bleeding edge experimentation, it appears that Windows Mobile, RIM (Blackberry) and Symbian devices have survived to be the default platforms that mobile business intelligence can be brought to.

Let’s look at what Cognos has been doing on these mobile platforms with their Cognos 8 Go! Mobile architecture. The main idea over at Cognos is that their architecture allows deployment of business intelligence to the mobile BI world without needing to re-author for the wireless device. Because there is no need to build and maintain a separate mobile BI deployment, the workflows stay the same. Business users can receive actual Cognos 8 BI reports that can be viewed through the native mobile device behaviors (scrolling, touch screen, clicking, etc). The clients (mobile phones) automatically format the data for viewing.

It’s easier to show you than to tell you, so let’s take a look at some images.

Here’s a Cognos dashboard on Windows Mobile:

As you see, we have typical Cognos dashboard charts, but on your Windows Mobile device! There is a map chart, pie chart, dials/gauges, and various bar charts.

Let’s take a look at some scorecards and BI dashboards for some of the other mobile devices.

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A truly effective business dashboard makes good use of color to display business intelligence in an easily understood manner. Color theory and the cognitive effects of color are subjects close to the hearts of visual artists, but seldom appreciated by BI practitioners. Many a time have a come across business dashboards, data charts and other quantitative output that has such poor use of color that the real message of the data is perverted.

No one has championed the cause of clear information graphic design more than Stephen Few, author of Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. His efforts in this area are unflagging and much appreciated. Kudos go to Stephen for his latest brilliance in an article entitled Practical Rules for Using Color in Charts. It’s the latest article in Stephen’s series of “>Visual Business Intelligence” newsletters.

The article serves as a primer for the use of color in visual depictions of business intelligence. It focuses on the basic rules that one must understand in order to enjoy the power that color can have to enhance the meaning and clarity of our work with visual business intelligence. We dashboard designers absolutely must read and understand this article.

Let’s take a quick sneak peek at a couple of the illustrations that Stephen uses in the article and then we’ll list out the 9 Rules for Using Color.

Here are 2 Excel chart examples of color use. I won’t reprint the context of these graphics here, so please visit the article for the brilliant analysis.

Now let’s look at the 9 Rules of Using Colors:

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Political Dashboard Update: Latest Election Results Dashboard:

This is a “Pop-Up Dashboard” from the New York Times site:

POP-UP DASHBOARD

Here’s a screen capture of the NY Times Election Dashboard from after the election:

And this is a google “live map” of the election results.

Now back to the original post on the “Best Political Dashboard of 2008″:

An unofficial poll by The Dashboard Spy of this election’s crop of political dashboards shows that Yahoo’s entry, Election 08 Political Dashboard, is the run-away winner. Based on a flash interface, the UI uses typically slick effects such as mouseovers. A nice design incorporating tabs, panes and popups makes this dashboard intuitive to use. The real buzz for us dashboard implementation types, however, lies in the data collection that powers this business intelligence dashboard. An interesting choice of measurements is what really powers this effective reporting dashboard.

In addition to showing the winners and losers in the 08 race by the usual metrics (pledged delegate votes being the most closely watched at the time of this writing), there is the use of some non-traditional data sources. This political dashboard provides related trends and analyses by collecting polling data, campaign fundraising dollars, “buzz” metrics and political prediction gaming data. Statistics come from four sources:

1. Poll Data from Real Clear Politics
2. Campaign Fund-raising Data from Associated Press (also regional demographics and historical voting records from AP)
3. Yahoo Search Engine Buzz
4. Intrade (Ireland-based intrade.com, a prediction market where you can place bets on real-world news)

Update: There was a slight mis-understanding due to a UI-related issue regarding the reordering of columns. Some users thought that the political prediction data sources were dropped by Yahoo. See Yahoo News Ditch the Political Prediction Markets. This is a good eye-opener about the importance of dashboard design and what may happen if you make a change after launch.

The usual demographic breakdowns are available, but also, you may drill down by state.

Here is a screenshot of the dashboard as of Feb 14, 2008:

 Click to visit the Election Dashboard.

This dashboarding project at Yahoo required the combined skills of several Yahoo units. According to a Dashboard Spy at Yahoo, the News, Flash, Data, Research, UI/Design, Operations, Tech and Quality Assurance teams really pulled together to produce this innovative BI dashboard.

Here is some input from a couple of Yahoo sources, including a computer scientist from Yahoo Research as well as Corporate:

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Since we’ve been talking about the design of Business Intelligence Dashboards and the influence of Web 2.0, I want to make sure to stress that Web 2.o is NOT about the shiny look of the big buttons. Web 2.0 is not about what the page looks like. Yes, we studied some examples of a common design aesthetic that has emerged, but Web 2.0 is beyond that. Likewise, it is also not about the underlying technology. When we think of AJAX, DOM, CSS, et al, we really are thinking about RIA (Rich Internet Application) tools and not Web 2.0.

So what is Web 2.0 and why should we enterprise dashboard designers care about it?

The real essence of Web 2.0 is about the content and the role of the user. It’s more of a philosophy that puts the user in the center and let’s them create the application that they really want. It’s about empowering the users through collaboration with each other, letting them generate their own content and enriching their data from sources outside of the core data set. I’m sure you use web applications that embrace all sorts of user generated content techniques like voting, tagging, blogging, etc, but have you used applications that “mash” data from disparate services?

You may not think it’s a big deal, because you pull data from your corporate system silos all the time – Data warehousing, ETL, etc. But stop and consider that we are talking about data your company doesn’t own. Now you see that we are starting to take a bigger step. One of letting your users consume data that you didnt’ generate and can’t even totally vouch for.

Confused about what I mean? Check out this collection of mashups at Programmable Web and you’ll find dashboards that combine data from yahoo, google, amazon, ebay and other popular APIs.

Let’s look at a business dashboard example that came up the other day with a Dashboard Spy reader interested in enriching their IBM Websphere Portal Dashboard with content from Google.

First off, I pointed the websphere dashboard programmer to the IBM developerWorks tutorial: IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets: Using the inter portlet communication feature.

It walks you through how to set up gadgets on the portal dashboard that interact with events triggered in other portlets. For Websphere Portal, there is a portlet available that specifically lets you create portlets that display Google Gadgets. The tutorial explains how to create a mashup dashboard and set up inter portlet communication.

Here is a snippet of the portlet tutorial. It shows how to write a source portlet that drives the content in a target portlet with a Google Maps display. Pretty nifty functionality to put on your enterprise dashboard, no?

What Google Gadgets can be put on your IBM Portal Dashboard? There are plenty of Google Gadgets to choose from! Take a look at this next screenshot to see some of the available widgets that you can put into your portlets:

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As mentioned in the Dashboard Spy post “Evolution of Dashboard Design Aesthetics“, there has been a trend of business intelligence dashboards and Balanced Scorecard Designs adopting the Web 2.0 look. Recently we’ve seen a lot of positive feedback on Web 2.0 inspired designs such as the Museum Dashboard. Web 2.0 design elements include the reflection of the logo, gradient colors, rounded corners, etc.

Today we have a contribution of a slickly designed dashboard. It’s from a Dashboard Spy reader who grabbed a sneak peek at an upcoming Balanced Scorecard / Dashboard product from a start up company. Their dashboard is in what he called an early alpha phase. It’s definitely Web 2.0ish in its design sensibility. Look at the shiny reflections! He calls it “Balanced Scorecard Meets Facebook”. It certainly has that modern feel.

Here is a screen grab. Click on the image to bring up a larger screenshot. After the image I’ll post some technical details.

From the creators of the dashboard:

The technology behind the dashboard:

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