Dashboard

Every time I post a business dashboard that makes use of dial gauges, I get lots of feedback from data visualization experts about why the gauges don’t add much value to the dashboard. OK, my infoviz specialists, try my latest thinking on for size:

So, if a particular dial gauge only adds a little value to a business intelligence dashboard, just add a ton of them to get lots of value!

Ha ha!! What do you think of my approach to dial gauges? Here’s an example. Check out this stock market dashboard. It features the use of a dial or two. Click on the dashboard screenshot to enlarge the image. On the actual dashboard, the dials can be drilled down to reveal historic data. Try out the stock market dashboard dials for yourself.

Stock Market Dashboard with a Couple of Dial Gauges

Actually, I was thinking about the above dashboard because I wanted to grab a snapshot of some financial market metrics at this historical time. Of course, the stock market is on everyone’s mind because of today’s 777 point decline. Here’s a memento of what happens when a $700billion rescue plan gets voted down.

Did anyone read the recent article in Computerworld/infoworld titled:

How BI could have provided early warning to financial market meltdown: Various analytic tools could have provided banks an early warning of the risks to their loans and securities, some observers say.

The premise is that analytics and business intelligence ought to have provided some visibility into the emergence of this financial mess (after all, they ARE called dashboards!)

Click on the following link to read an excerpt from the article:
» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Stock Market Dashboard ............

The previous post detailing a Lotus Notes Dashboard showed some good looking charts and graphs. What the screenshots did not show, however, was the fact that those graphs were animated. Today we give you a flavor of the animation of the graphs, as well as dig into the technology behind the dashboard charts.

The metrics charts were created, we found out, using a charting package called FusionCharts. It’s part of a suite of flash charting components that can be used in ASP, JSP, PHP, HTML and even Microsoft PowerPoint. If you would like to try out the software, InfoSoft Global, the maker, has released a free version called FusionCharts Free.

Here is a screenshot of a mockup of a financial dashboard using bullet graphs and sparklines:

Remember, the above dashboard uses flash to provide some animation. Take a look at the financial flash dashboard demo to see the “eye candy” extras that the animation provides.

Interested in how these flash charts work? Here’s a neat Fusion Charts resource at ronludwig.com that lets you view a Fusion Chart and see the underlying XML:

Here’s a look at the XML for a Donut Chart:

Click on the “more” link to see additional sample flash-based dashboards.
» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Animating Dashboard Charts with Flash ............

Thanks goes to the Dashboard Spy reader who sent in material regarding creating dashboard reports in the Lotus Notes client. My quick research leads me to agree with your opinion that the “buy” option is better than the “build” option. Let’s share with the other readers what you found for creating dashboards against a Notes database.

Intelliprint Dashboard Reporting is a native solution for Lotus Notes and Domino that provides reporting and dashboards within the workflow of Notes applications.

Let’s take a look at a couple of Intelliprint dashboard screenshots. We start off inside Lotus Notes by selecting a dashboard report:

Click on the more link to view the rest of the lotus notes dashboard screenshots.
» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Dashboards in Lotus Notes ............

Business dashboard projects are often journeys rather than simple implementations. It’s a journey through a world of choices between the right metrics, the technologies, the data collection challenges and data visualization techniques. Sometimes it feels to us dashboard designers that BI is an exotic land in which our challenge is to find (or create) the right path for our users.

Enjoy the journey of exploration of your business intelligence choices, because, as I hope you agree, it’s the most rewarding part. As Don Williams Jr (American novelist and poet) said, “The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.”

You don’t have to take the journey alone. There are plenty of us out in the world of business intelligence visualization that can help guide you. Maybe our advice can smooth your way. The gems that we share perhaps can save you fruitless trips down the wrong paths and steer you away from problem areas. This has been the goal of The Dashboard Spy’s efforts to document business dashboards as I come across them out in the wild. I hope my efforts have helped.

Sometimes we meet fellow travellers on our journeys of discovery that act so graciously and share information of such value that we should stop everyone else and tell them at once about what we’ve found. The purpose of today’s post is to do exactly that.

Tim Wilson, aka Gilligan, has put together a series of three wonderful posts that detail his year-long journey of envisioning, researching, designing and building a corporate dashboard for his company to use in performance management. Everyone involved in business intelligence dashboards must read this tale of a beautiful dashboard journey in which Tim so carefully details his discoveries and shares the struggles and rewards of his dashboard design efforts.

1. Dashboard Design: An Iterative Tale Part 1
2. Dashboard Design: An Iterative Tale Part 2
3. Dashboard Design: An Iterative Tale Part 3

Of course, I said earlier that the journey and not the destination should be the focus, but let me jump right to the destination and show you the screenshot of where Tim ended up. It’s an Excel Dashboard created with Excel 2003 without any addons.

Here are a couple of observations from Tim:

Some of the keys that make this work:

• Heavy focus on Few’s Tufte-derived “data-pixel ratio” –- asking the question for everything on the dashboard: “If it’s not white space, does it have a real purpose for being on the dashboard?” And, only including elements where the answer is, “Yes.”
• Recognition that all metrics aren’t equal –- I seriously beefed up the most critical, end-of-the-day metrics (almost too much – there’s a plan for the one bar chart to be scaled down in the future once a couple other metrics are available)
• The exact number of what we did six months ago isn’t important -– I added sparklines (with targets when available) so that the only specific number shown is the month-to-date value for the metric; the sparkline shows how the metric has been trending relative to target
• Pro-rating the targets -– it made for formulas that were a bit hairier, but each target line now assumes a linear growth over the course of the month; the target on Day 5 of a 30-day month is 1/6 of the total target for the month
• Simplification of alerts -– instead of red/yellow/green…we went to red/not red; this really makes the trouble spots jump out.

Be sure to spend some time with each of Tim’s 3 posts. They contain lots of lessons learned.

Tim - thanks for the great effort. This is a wonderful tale of a beautiful dashboard journey. I’m adding you to top of The Dashboard Spy’s Big List of Dashboard Experts.

Tags: Excel Dashboard, Sparklines, Excel Dashboard Design, Data Visualization, Corporate Dashboards

A Dashboard Spy reader wanted to know the difference between BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and BI (Business Intelligence). He caught part of a BAM software presentation from an enterprise software vendor and was hard-pressed to see the difference between what he saw and what BI systems as he knew them offered.

Let’s do a little research and look at a BAM dashboard to see if we can explain the difference.

First off, let’s look at a Business Activity Monitoring dashboard to see what type of metrics might be on it. Here’s the iWay Activity Monitor:

It would appear that BAM is about real-time event monitoring. It targets the status and results of business operations, processes and transactions from data surfaced from automated processes.

A description from iWay Software:

iWay Activity Monitor was designed to integrate business activity monitoring (BAM) and business intelligence (BI) technology in a simple yet powerful way by enabling administrators to view, monitor, and report on iWay Software processes. This BI/BAM solution captures end-to-end transaction and workflow data across multiple applications and business units, summarizing and displaying trading partner metrics to help managers make informed decisions.

Hmm. Even the vendor’s description seems to blend BAM and BI. We’ll have to do some more research to tease out the differences.

Let’s take a look at the origin of the term Business Activity Monitoring.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Difference Between BI and BAM ............

What do The Beatles and Jay-Z have to do with business intelligence dashboards?

Welcome to the world of the data mashup!

As we have seen in the last few business intelligence dashboard examples, there is definitely a trend towards the use of data mashups on enterprise dashboards. Components such as Google Maps are valuable contributions on BI dashboards that add to the value of the user experience.

I’d like to point out an MP3 on tdwi.com that gives some great background on data mashups. It’s an interview titled: Audio Report: Mashups, Data and BI.

Byron Igoe starts off by explaining the general mashup phenomenon with a look at The Grey Album - a mashup of The White Album by the Beatles and The Black Album by Jay-Z. He explains that the idea of mashups in general has become quite popular.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Business Intelligence Data Mashups with Jay-Z and The Beatles ............

The ComputerWorld Best Places to Work Dashboard was a mashup that featured a Google Maps component. I particularly liked seeing that on the dashboard, so I decided delve into the details of how Google Maps was incorporated into the Xcelsius 2008 dashboard.

It turns out that the functionality is achieved through Xcelsius plugins from Centigon Solutions. Ryan Goodman, the founder of Centigon (and Dashboard Spy reader and contributor - see Xcelsius Gas Price Data Visualization) was kind enough to participate in a Dashboard Spy interview. He explains their approach as well as his opinions on Xcelsius 2008 as a business intelligence platform.

But, first, let’s take a look at a demo dashboard put together by Ryan to demonstrate the plugin components for Xcelsius 2008. You can try out the Google Maps for Xcelsius Demo Dashboard for yourself at the link.

The Dashboard Spy Interview with Ryan Goodman:
» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: GMaps Plugin for Xcelsius Dashboards ............

In light of some recent negative reviews of Xcelsius 2008 (see Xcelsius Dashboards Bashed), the Dashboard Spy recently sent out a call for Business Objects Xcelsius 2008 dashboards so as to see how the product is being used out in the field. Today we start our brief visit of some Xcelsius 2008 dashboards by looking at an example of a dashboard from Computerworld.com titled the Best Places to Work Dashboard.

No enterprise application is an island, and a digital dashboard is no exception. We have studied the growing acceptance by corporations of enterprise mashup dashboards, in which content is assembled from shared APIs made available from third parties. The Best Places to Work Dashboard is just such a mashup dashboard with shared live data from newsfeeds, stock prices, and GoogleMaps.

Here is a screenshot of the mashup dashboard followed by a Dashboard Spy video of the Xcelsius dashboard.

Dashboard Spy Video:

Click on the “more” link of this post to read details of this Xcelsius mashup.

» Read more about this business intelligence dashboard example: Best Places to Work Dashboard ............