Dashboard

Here at The Dashboard Spy, we’ve been keenly tracking the increasing adoption by business intelligence applications, dashboards, and database reporting tools of RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies. The promise of RIA to provide enriched user interaction and the concurrent trend towards usability and user-centric design bodes well for intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces for business applications in general and BI dashboards in particular.

We’ve featured business dashboards using exciting RIA-style technologies such as Flash, AJAX, Flex, Air, Silverlight, etc. and have seen that the technology by itself certainly does not guarantee a good user experience. It is the underlying information architecture, design and visualization approaches that make for a sensible, user-centric dashboard experience.

Today we look at a flash-based database and dashboarding technology that uniquely combines several elements of our Web 2.0 world. Think of a web-based database that is easy to use because it allows drag and drop, and other rich internet application features. On top of that, you find that the interface to the database is very dashboarder friendly with built-in status indicator lights, flags and conditionally formatted graphics. Now add to that the ability to share your database with the world. The flip side of that sharing of course is the ability to browse and consume interesting data sets shared by others. Roll all this together and you get a social database that may be a dashboarder’s dream.

The web-based, sharing aspect may remind you of the Google Apps spreadsheet application. It’s along similar lines in that it is a compelling, no-cost option for sharing data across the internet. But you may find the user experience and graphic design of blist more cutting-edge, but I’ll let you decide for yourself.

Blist bills itself as “the World’s Easiest Database” with the intent of “creating a new category of online social databases that combine an instantly intuitive and comprehensible user interface with a vibrant community of data, data templates, and people.”

Here’s a video about blist from the company that explains what blist is.

The world’s easiest database? Well, that’s certainly a lofty goal, so let’s look at some screenshots and try it out for ourselves.

Here is a screen capture of the out-of-the-box sample database. You can see some icons that come in handy for BI dashboarding such as conditional formatted bars, status flags, etc.

Here is a sample of the types of charting available. This is a screengrab of a bar chart:

Here is a look at the Blist Activity Dashboard which serves as an interesting jump-off point when it comes to browsing available data shared by others. Think of the possibilities if you can keep tabs on the work of other BI dashboarders. Interesting idea in business intelligence collaboration.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: World’s Easiest Dashboard? ............

Dashboard Design Topic: Using Colors for Business Dashboard Alerts

You hear about a problem so you log on to your business dashboard looking for red alerts among your KPIs and metrics. Not an uncommon use case, right? Your dashboard should clearly alert you to the conditions most requiring attention. Well, let’s spend this post talking about how to display alert conditions.

First off, think about the “heirarchy of alerts” that exist in your organization. There are, of course, the low-level everyday advisory types of alerts. “Did you know?” style alerting includes announcements and reminders such as service advisories. Then there are more of the health status indications. These are what we think of when we want to report on the state of KPIs and metrics. The real challenge here is to design the alerts such that they stand out on your busy dashboard.

We’ll address some of the principles behind the effective design of alerts, but first I’d like you to visit this post for a humorous look at the idea of the “heirarchy of alerts“.

Getting back to designing alerts on dashboards, take a look at the “Red Alerts” in this graphic below. There are 7 of them:

Now take a look at the 7 Red Alerts in this graphic:

This visual design exercise simply shows that when you reduce visual “noise”, the “signal” becomes much easier to understand.

Let’s illustrate this principal with a great example contributed by Dashboard Spy reader Mike Gaffney, a talented software architect and dashboard designer at BoxTone, a company that monitors mobile application service levels. In his blog post titled The BoxTone Dashboard and the Blackberry Outage, Mike shares his view that dashboards must use strong color values only to indicate alert states:

If you quickly glance at the dashboard in its normal state (version 1) and the dashboard in its “alert” state (version 2), you should immediately notice that version 2 stands out more. It stands out more because of the careful and restrained use of colors.

Unlike many other dashboards, the BoxTone Dashboard uses highly saturated colors only when there is a problem. Edward Tufte’s, Envisioning Information (1990), has a chapter entitled “Color and Information” which provides an excellent overview on the use of color. When everything is normal, the BoxTone Dashboard looks, well … normal.

Our users are highly intelligent people. They do not need bright green check marks to make them feel good about themselves. They bought BoxTone to tell them when something is wrong. And when something is wrong, they want to know what it is and quickly!

A single bright red dot on a calm page screams out and demands the user’s immediate attention. On February 11, 2008 (date of the RIM Blackberry Outage), this technique is what allowed our users to know instantly that the problem was a global one.

Here are some screenshots showing what Mike is talking about.

Here is the BoxTone dashboard in it’s normal state. Click on the dashboard screenshot to enlarge the dashboard.

Now take a look at the dashboard in an alert condition:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: When a Dashboard Goes Red ............

Dashboard Topic: Excel Dashboards - A Report from the Trenches.

Every once in a while, I get a submission of a business dashboard from a Dashboard Spy reader that makes me stop and really think about what dashboarding really is. I’m not trying to get philosophical on you, but we all live in a day and age where everything looks shiny and slick - often at the expense of real value. The dashboard vendors come and show us all these beautiful interfaces and we ooh and ahh, wowed by the eye candy. I sometimes think we buy reporting packages and engage vendors based more on how beautiful they can make our dashboards rather than suitablity to the task at hand - creating a business intelligence application or report that helps us manage our day to day activities.

A Dashboard Spy reader, Edwin Thorn, sent in a nice little note and a home-brewed Excel Dashboard. He calls it his “Excel Cockpit” and is quite proud of it. It will not win any graphic design awards - that is certain, but that does not take any value away from the effort. The Microsoft Excel does its job. It informs an entire department of the latest in sales trends. Built by a power user on the business side, it required nothing more than determination and self motivation. No IT department, no user interface team, just the users and the data.

So what this submission of the Excel dashboard (in this case, a management summary dashboard) make me think of is the value that “core” dashboarding brings. By core, I mean the focus on the metrics and KPIs. Not worrying all that much about the graphic design aspects. Of course that is important, but don’t let it slow down the rest of the process. I see a lot of Excel dashboards out in the field like this - rough but valuable in its utility.

The way the dashboarding tools are evolving, the look and feel will begin to start taking care of itself. The latest version of Excel of course has incredible graphics and built in dashboarding features. The new crop of these Do It Yourself Excel Dashboards will be interesting to study. I definitely recommend the Michael Alexander book, Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies.

Here’s the note - short and sweet:

Hello Dashboard Spy - Enclosed find an Excel dashboard application I made for my department after being inspired by your site.Looking arround on the internet, I found some cool stuff to make cockpits with Excel applications and this is the result. If you have any questions, just ask.

Here is the screenshot of the Excel dashboard. I’ll provide the link to the file after the “more” link. Also, I’ll link to some dashboard icons that can be used to update the look of the dashboard.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Do-It-Yourself-Dashboards-Alive-and-Well ............

Dashboard Topic: Municipal Performance Management Dashboards

A city as large as New York City certainly has a large task ahead of it when it comes to reporting performance. Of course, city officials can produce key performance metrics (KPIs), that’s not the problem. In fact, thousands of such metrics flood the city management offices every day. The challenge is how to organize the data into a meaningful presentation suitable for public consumption and understanding.

Here is a screengrab of the New York City Citywide Performance Reporting application. BTW, it’s an OBIEE dashboard application. That’s Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for us non-acronym types.

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Note the large number of city agencies that you can pull performance metrics data for. Here is a screenshot of the dropdown.

Join us after the “more” link to view a video from the mayor discussing the performance reporting application:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Citywide Performance Reporting Dashboard for NYC ............

Business Intelligence Dashboards show a smorgashboard of metrics and KPIs. Business users can peruse a range of statistics and pick out areas that warrant attention. Sometimes the metrics span across various business areas (common among CEO Dashboards), but more commonly, users can configure their metrics. There may be a “configure reports” or similarly named button that leads to a form page. Sometimes these pages offer preview capability of the graphics, but many times these configuration pages are straight-forward form-style screens.

With the adoption of Rich Internet Application technologies by the dashboard world, we are seeing more and more slick ways for users to configure their dashboards on the fly. No longer do users have to go to a configurator page, or worse yet, call someone in IT to give specs for a change to their screens. Through AJAX, DHTML, Flash or other technologies, we are seeing drag and drop capabilities appear on dashboards that let users simply grab and move dashboard portlets to their liking. Similarly users can drag and drop desired portlet content on configuration pages to create personally relevant business dashboard content.

Have a look at this video from the creator of a dashboard for fitness clubs (ClubReady) in which they show off the “unlocking” of the dashboard and the subsequent rearrangement of the dashboard layout. The screenshot below the vidoe shows the action of the unlock button.

A short video below of a fitness center dashboard shows drag and drop dashboards in practice.

Fitness Center Dashboard

Here is the close up screenshot of the unlock button:

Let’s take a look at the sales dashboards themselves:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Drag and Drop Dashboard Configuration ............

Dashboards at any price? We take as gospel the value of Business Intelligence. No one doubts the value of actionable intelligence or the guidance that a good decision support system brings. We let the fat cats up top dictate a direction and we hustle to implement a business intelligence system. We check the Gartner BI Magic Quadrant and peruse the vendor literature. We even check the trade magazines for reviews. Standard operating procedure, right?

Well, imagine my surprise the other day when I came across a magazine article that actually called into question whether a certain Performance Management system was really BI or BS. Talk about rocking the boat and upsetting the status quo. What happened to the usual cheerleading?

The article Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007: BI Worth the Price? calls into question the value that the $20,000 per server license brings. They quote skeptical IT managers who call the product the “magic 8 ball server”, the “Dilbert Point-Haired Boss Server” and “eye candy for managers”. Ouch!

Well let’s take a quick look at the so-called eye candy. Here are some screenshots of PerformancePoint Server dashboards thanks to the contribution of Dashboard Spy reader Todd.

And here is the screenshot that got Todd upset initally (see his comment). It’s using the Excel add-in to provide the front end.

Let’s take a look at the product and see what it offers:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: PerformancePoint Server Dashboards - BI or BS? ............

CIO Dashboards can wind up helping or hindering the management of an IT organization. On the whole however, a CIO Dashboard project is well worth doing if you do it right. That’s basically the summary of a great article from Information Week titled Hunting the Elusive CIO Dashboard.

The article stresses the importance of selecting the right metrics, managing well upon receiving the right information, and taking the time to properly prepare the data necessary for the project.

Take a look at these 8 Steps Towards a CIO Dashboard:

Here are the steps for those that can’t see the graphic:

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: 8 Steps Towards a CIO Dashboard ............

Sparklines and dashboards are perfect together because they both embrace the “more information in less space” approach. In the past, we’ve featured the use of sparklines on some very innovative business intelligence interfaces, including this award-winning dashboard. Thankfully, we are seeing more business intelligence reporting and charting products offer sparklines as a graphing option.

For those who don’t have an easy way to generate sparklines for your dashboards, let’s take a look at the wonderful work by Joe Gregorio with his online sparkline generator.

As you can see from this series of screenshots, the Sparkline Generator Web Application and web service can come in very handy for your dashboard work. The application creates a publicly available URL to your sparkline. Alternatively, you can just pass in parameters to the URL. What a great contribution to Web 2.0. It’s been available for years, but we in the business intelligence dashboard community should all try and raise its profile.

Here is a screencap of the sparkline generator. Be sure to click the more button to see the generated sparklines and also a sample of how to put the data values into a title attribute.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Sparkline Generator for your Dashboard Graphs ............