Enterprise Dashboard Digest

Continuing our examination of cutting-edge business dashboards using RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies, we now look at the state of the art of Microsoft Silverlight dashboards. Never heard of a Silverlight dashboard? Well, it’s no wonder. By comparison, business intelligence dashboards using Flash, Flex, AJAX and other RIA approaches are commonplace. Working silverlight dashboards, however, are hard to find.

Because of the vast differences between older versions of Silverlight (current version is 2.0), dashboard examples found on the web often no longer work. Additionally, not everyone wants to bother with downloading and installing Microsoft Silverlight.

What exactly is Microsoft Silverlight? Roughly speaking, it’s a competitor to Flash/Flex technologies with some unique advantages and disadvantages. It is highly interactive and can be used to create slick, highly-polished applications with a big wow factor.

Infragistics, the long-time third-party component vendor that Dashboard Spy readers no doubt know, has been working on a set of components for Silverlight. They put together a sample demo application called faceOut that you have to check out. It’s a demo that shows off Silverlight and its application to scorecards and dashboards.

You’ll need Silverlight 2.0 installed to view the faceOut demo. Because not everyone wants to install it (or as often the case in enterprise environments, not allowed to install software), we’ve provided a Dashboard Spy video that gives you a sense of the interaction of the sales dashboard.

Let’s take a look at the video. Be sure to click on the more link to view the rest of this post, as I’ve also found a nice wireframe of the dashboard by the Infragistics designers.

And here is the video I captured of the Infragistics Silverlight dashboard. Click on the image to visit the video.

The above embedded video is in flash format and shows the Infragistics faceOut Silverlight Dashboard demo. If you’d like to download a higher resolution avi file of the silverlight dashboard to watch locally on your machine, use this link: Dashboard Video.

Did you like that catchy Dashboard Spy theme song, by the way? It’s still the only song out there about business intelligence! Now on to some more info on this Silverlight dashboard:

Continue reading ‘Microsoft Silverlight for Dashboards’ »

2008 Election Dashboard Update:

Election Returns Map:

The Dashboard Spy reviews scores of political dashboards in the post:

Election Dashboards

Original post: We’ve highlighted some 2008 election dashboards in past posts on Dashboards By Example and have seen some pretty nifty work. Let’s continue that theme and look at an Adobe Flex dashboard coded by a long time Dashboard Spy reader and fellow BI blogger, Doug Marttila from forestandthetrees.com fame.

As you may know, Flex 3, the latest release from Adobe, has an increased number of charting components of interest to Business Dashboarders. For those interested in an insider’s view of programming with Flex 3, visiting Doug’s blog will give you a good sense of using Flex for data visualization. His recent work with a dashboard that tracks the 2008 election (delegate counts in particular) has been noteworthy.

Here’s the information that Doug sent along with his dashboard contribution:

I made this flex dashboard in part to learn Flex Charting Components – which I now think are great. I’m a full time flash/flex developer, so I’m biased. But, I think that Flex is clearly the best choice for dashboard development: fast development, lots of pre-built tools, and a growing open source community adding more libraries (many applicable to dashboards) all the time.

Thanks so much for sharing this great dashboard, Doug!

Here are some screenshots. Of course, so you’ll want to visit the flex dashboard demo itself to get a feel of how the flex components feel. Here’s the link: 2008 Election Flex Dashboard

Tags: 2008 Election Dashboard, Adobe Flex Dashboards, Political Dashboard, Election Campaign tracking dashboard.

The “art of dashboards”? Sounds trite and a stretch, but let the Dashboard Spy explain. We’ve heard it said that art is the expression of ideas, right? That it is a form of communication between people. One in which the artist understands and uses to his or her advantage the sensibilities of the audience to both inform opinion and shape ideas.

Well, that certainly sounds like what we do every day with business intelligence, doesn’t it? Business dashboards have the ability to not only to report metrics and KPIs, but to do so in a manner that shapes opinion, influences action and strikes varying tones of urgency. BI metrics may be cut and dry (and that is a debatable statement), but the communication of the meaning of the metrics is an art.

Business dashboarding is a highly visual medium. One that relies on basic human perceptions and principles of cognition. It is also an information-dense medium, in which the nuances of information presentation are tied closely with the ability of the dashboard designers to competently capture and express the metrics and their meaning. A screen full of icons, red/green/yellow indicators, pie charts, bar graphs, blinking alerts and data tables may only obfuscate the true message when presented wrong. We’ve all seen poorly designed dashboards that assault the business user to the point of numbness.

The reason I’m on this riff on the art of dashboards is because of some very interesting materials that a Dashboards By Example reader shared with me. Want to see some artifacts of a dashboard design team that clearly knows the art of expression through a business dashboard? Thanks to Andres, the solution architect at UberBI, a start-up company that produces business dashboards, we have this look at some wireframes, screenshots and even an interactive demo.

Take a look at this great hand-drawn wireframe:

And here’s an example of a final look and feel of the interface:

Gorgeous work, isn’t it?

We’ll detail some of the project infromation but first, let’s take a look at more project artifacts:

Continue reading ‘The Uber Art of Dashboards’ »

Dashboard Spy readers know that I have one particular worry that always keeps me up during a business intelligence dashboard project. What if I built a dashboard and no one cared? I mean that literally. What if the only ones who ever visited the dashboard, or clicked on the data drilldowns, or looked at the charts and graphs were the project sponsor, the programming team, the data analysts, the user interface designers and myself? No business users at all. The business dashboard itself might be a thing of absolute perfection with just the right nuances in the data visualizations, all the best factors in information architecture and usability, stunning graphic design and intuitive navigation, etc, etc. – But so what? In other words, we threw the best damn party in business intelligence reporting and no guests came at all. What a waste of money and talent that would be.

Others have been thinking about similar scenarios as well and trying to solve this challenge in innovative ways. Alan Wille, President and CEO of Serence Inc has been passionate about the idea of where to place business KPIs, dashboards, and reports so that users can’t avoid the message. As reported previously by The Dashboard Spy in the post titled The 3 Rules of Dashboards, Mr. Wille has vigorously promoted the idea of The Rule of Placement. As he likes to explain, the key to user adoption is location, location, location. Mr. Wille is advancing the bold idea that the user’s PC desktop is the right place to put KPIs because that way they are always automatically presented to a user, who may often be too busy to ask for the business metrics.

Allan has kindly submitted a great article on the subject for Dashboard Spy readers entitled “Drive Adoption and Performance from the Desktop: Innate awareness of performance hinges on unavoidable KPI reporting“. You can click on the “more” link below this dashboard screenshot to access the rest of this post for the content, or, if you prefer, click on the link to access the PDF version for printing.

Continue reading ‘The Unavoidable Dashboard – Driving KPI Adoption and Performance Management from the Desktop’ »