Keane Practice Management Dashboards are part of their H.I.S. (Hospital Information Systems) offerings and are designed to allow MSOs (Management Services Organizations), PHOs (Physician Hospital Organizations), IDNs (Integrated Delivery Networks), large multi-specialty group practices and even large physician practices to track profitability and minimize risk within their practices.
Here we see an example of an executive dashboard focusing on financial management summaries. The center panel provides a daily management snapshot with revenue, accounts/receivable, DNFB (Discharged Not Final Billed), and other financial metrics. Flanking either side of the center portlet are a series of dial gauges with various KPIs.
Click on the dashboard screenshot to enlarge it for viewing.
Executive dashboard with summary of financial KPIs
BI for Breakfast? Here’s a look at how a restaurant might monitor their business via a performance dashboard. Thanks goes to Robert Allison who created this restaurant dashboard in SAS/GRAPH leveraging a design by Charley Kyd of ExcelUser dashboards.
Here is the restaurant performance dashboard. It’s titled “Performance for the Month”.
I’m particularly intrigued by the commentary:
Sales continued their downward trend again this week. The continuing rise in gasoline prices increased freight costs and has hurt gross profits throughout the company. The recent series of ads has increased breakfast traffic. The series for dinner traffic starts Feburary 8. All items have been replaced. New menus to be completed by Feb 4 and distributed by Feb 8.
I’m always a big fan of comments on dashboards, particularly when they are well written and insightful. But the main challenge is exactly who provides the comment.
Topic: The BI Stack – business intelligence architecture stack. Here is an excellent depiction of the business intelligence architectural stack as envisioned by the analysts at Forrester.
Here at the Dashboard Spy’s Dashboards by Example, we have been focusing on Dashboards (of course!) but are fully aware that they are but a portion of the business intelligence landscape. This excellent diagram shows the place that dashboards have within the entire structure.
Click on the BI Stack Diagram to enlarge the image:
bi stack diagram
Click on the “more” link to see what Forrester says about the BI Stack.
Performance improvement is both amazingly simple and frustratingly difficult. I say “amazingly simple” because of the effect where simply focusing attention on an area will lead to improvements. And of course, in terms of “frustratingly difficult”, we are all aware of the wall we run into where no matter what further actions we take, we no longer get returns on our efforts.
In researching some educational performance improvement dashboard projects, I came across a nice slide presentation that summarizes well three key steps for achieving performance improvement.
Let’s take a look at this case study.
The spirit and motivations behind the “No Child Left Behind” Act of 2001 served as the impetus to quite a few performance measurement and improvement projects in the world of public education. Today we look at a performance dashboard project and its presentation on ed.gov: Strategic Use of Data for Improvement in the School District of Philadelphia.
Basically stated, the goal of the project was to take the following three steps for ultimately improving performance:
Turn Data into Knowledge
Turn Knowledge into Action
Turn Action into Improvement
Hey, isn’t there a song? Turn, turn, turn….
Here are some graphics from the slide deck:
Tags: Continuous Improvement Process, School Dashboard, Performance Dashboards, Performance optimization, Performance Improvement dashboards, business intelligence dashboards, school dashboards, school metrics, student dashboard
The question of whether pie charts are as good as they would appear to be (judging by their popularity with business users), continues to be examined. The excellent statistical visualization / infographics blog, flowingdata.com, recently discussed alternatives to the pie chart when reviewing the results of a reader survey. Here is a brief screengrab from their post:
Dell’s IdeaStorm project embraces their customer’s ideas and input in a serious manner. Customers have contributed over 9700 ideas through the program. Dell management is committed to reviewing submissions and identifying trends in customer ideas and wishes – “to gauge which ideas are most important and relevant to the public”.
Once you sign up, you may click on “suggest an idea” and post your ideas. These ideas, along with those of others, are commented on by the community at large. Users get a dashboard that includes statistics on the number of ideas you have submitted, voted on, commented on, etc. The dashboard shows the latest community activity on your ideas and those ideas on which you have voted or commented on.
Here’s a screenshot of the “My Products” dashboard:
For more on this user dashboard, please click on the “read more” link:
A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me to ask about adding comments to his Excel worksheets so that his users would be prompted to take certain input actions. He’s building a series of excel dashboards complete with data input screens.
I directed him to Michael Alexander’s latest Excel Tip: Adding Tool Tips to Cells, a quick but excellent video tutorial on how to achieve a tool tip effect such as you see below:
Take a look at this business dashboard. Forgive me for saying so, but upon viewing this dashboard, I couldn’t help but think of Rube Goldberg Machines, those convoluted devices that take incredibly complicated paths to perform a simple task.
I’ll let you decide for yourself. Here’s the video of the dashboard. It is titled “Visual Communication – Business Dashboards” and has the stated goal of “Improving communication of data – an example of an escape from the traditional spreadsheet”.
Maybe, it’s just me, but I find the design way too complicated. Plus isn’t it overwhelming in a mechanical sort of way? I can’t help but think of those Rube Goldberg cartoons.
Below the video is another video that you should watch. It’s a real favorite of mine.
Visual Communication – Business Dashboards
MythBusters Rube Goldberg Machine
For more videos of interest to business intelligence and dashboard practioners, please visit the new dashboard video blog, Dashboards.TV where you’ll find videos on digital dashboards, business intelligence software, metrics, KPIs and more.
The Dashboard Spy Collection of Business Intelligence White Papers is now live. You can easily preview and select white papers from multiple vendors across industry categorizations. Case studies and free business trade magazines are also available.
Some of the most interesting BI white papers on the site are:
The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence White Paper Collection is now live and available to the general business community. Available at http://enterprise-dashboard.tradepub.com , this resource gathers leading business intelligence white papers and case studies from major software vendors and service providers. The BI white papers are categorized in an intuitive, easy-to-browse manner, summarized and offered for immediate download.
Prior to the launch of this unique business intelligence resource, the process of locating and requesting current white papers and case studies from multiple vendors was a time-consuming task involving searching many websites. During the beta test to a selected audience of business intelligence dashboard project teams and business users, the usability of the BI white paper collection was studied and optimized.
“Part of the value of reading white papers is to keep up with the latest trends and products” said a beta tester who manages an information technology department, “I spent a lot of time figuring out which whitepapers were hot and which ones were a waste of my time. Now I just look at the Top 10 White Papers list on the Dashboard Spy BI White Paper Collection to see which ones I really ought to read. My favorite section of the site is the I.T. white paper section at http://enterprise-dashboard.tradepub.com/?pt=cat&page=Info ”
The Dashboard Spy Business Intelligence White Paper Collection is a project led by The Dashboard Spy, a popular, but unidentified, figure in the business intelligence community. The Dashboard Spy publishes thousands of screenshots of business intelligence dashboards and scorecards as a reference resource for BI dashboard designers and users. “This resource is an outgrowth of the List of Dashboard Experts project available at http://dashboardspy.com/experts ” explains The Dashboard Spy. “People told me that they would love a collection of the most useful dashboard and business intelligence whitepapers.”
In keeping with the spirit of the 2008 Summer Olympics, I’ve been posting some data visualizations and dashboards related to the Beijing Games. On Dashboards by Example we saw the Olympics Dashboard done in Adobe Flex by iDashboards and, on The Dashboard Spy, we saw the New York Times Olympic Medal Count Infographic.
You’ll have to visit the actual infographic to have it work, but once you get there just follow these instructions:
Circles are sized by the number of medals that countries won in summer Olympic Games. Use the slider to view past Olympics, or click on a country to display a list of its medal winners.
The point of today’s post, however, is to laud the work of a Microsoft Excel enthusiast in this area. Chandoo, editor of the hilariously-named PointyHairedDilbert:Excel Tips, Technology Tidbits & Business Insights, has created the following Excel-based version of the New York Times Olympic Medal bubble chart:
Isn’t that great? Moreover, Chandoo details how he created this in Excel:
On the business side, the focus of a KPI or scorecard project is always on determining what specific levels trigger the various red/green/yellow conditions. But how, as the designer or programmer, do you lay out the dashboard screen for the user to enter these levels? We've seen hundreds of view mode screenshots, but what about [...]
By their nature and design, some business dashboards are “set and forget”. That is, the dashboard user configures the dashboard settings at some point when they start using it and hardly ever fiddles with it again going forward. Or, they never change it from the default settings. In fact, many dashboards don’t offer any user [...]
Dashboard applications, more so than any other business software, are visual in nature. The more the “at-a-glance” nature of the dashboard, the easier the users find it to use and understand. Above all else, a clear understanding of the business condition is the goal of the corporate dashboard. Icons and other simple graphical representations are used extensively [...]
The at-a-glance approach that is so critical to enterprise dashboards is so compelling that it is becoming prevalent in corporate communications. The 2005 annual report for TNT, a world-wide transportation management company, used a visually pleasing financial dashboard approach to communicate the year’s financial results. Note: Hey, Dashboard Spies!: Do you know how smart you [...]
An excellent example of a well designed Enterprise Dashboard. Tags: Dashboard Design, Business Intelligence User Interface Design, Sales Pipeline Enterprise Dashboards When certain enterprise dashboards get submitted to the Dashboard Spy dashboard screenshot collection, I know right away that it’s a big winner. For us executive dashboard enthusiasts, a digital dashboard sample is worth returning [...]
