Dashboard

Dashboards: Business intelligence tools, Business intuition enablers, or both?

The role of intuition in the business place has certainly grown in the “softer”, more people-focused areas of the enterprise. Note the number of books available on topics such as emotional quotients, consumer desire and team building. Decisions are made based not only on the cold hard facts (i.e. “the numbers”) but by more nebulous decision criteria. Can the same be said, however, for the more analytical parts of the business enterprise? Is there room for intuition when it comes to business intelligence?

Are numbers and metrics cut and dried? Certainly the gathering and crunching of the data should be held to a quantitative approach that is both rigorous and free of bias. The graphical display of the data, likewise, should be accomplished in a consise, accurate manner free of misleading suggestion. Information visualization experts such as Stephen Few (see his excellent book Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data and the upcoming Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis) constantly preach the importance of correct information graphic design.

In discussions with some Dashboard Spy readers, I’ve looked at both sides of this issue. I’ll share with you some of this very interesting discussion.

From a Dashboard Spy at Actuate, we get this contribution of how to make sure that you don’t confuse business intelligence with off-the-cuff intuition:

Business Intelligence Versus Intuition

Almost any good business-person will tell you that predictions based on detailed information are typically more reliable than predictions based on feelings or intuition. The saying “knowledge is power” operates on the premise that if you know more than your competitors do, you can make powerful decisions for your company. Nowadays, businesses are turning to business intelligence (BI) to help them guide their decision-making processes. BI can be a powerful tool, but it is only as strong as the data that the system analyzes. When poor or irrelevant data goes in, poor and irrelevant business intelligence is reported. Often, companies don’t know how to use their business intelligence systems correctly and end up relying on their gut feelings instead of their BI reports. The good news is that you can learn how to leverage your data to get the best possible business intelligence for your company.

One of the first and most important things that companies neglect to do is define their objectives. What do you want to get out of your business intelligence system? What are the factors that drive your business? What type of business decisions do you commonly face? By determining what type of information you’ll need from your system, you can work backwards to decide what data is important for your company, what is useful to have for future reference, and what can be discarded. You can apply this method to sales data, customer information, and other important information that your company has collected.

Once you have determined what data should go into the system, a process needs to be put in place to maintain the cleanliness and usability of the data. Designations must remain consistent in order for your business intelligence system to produce usable BI. For example, if one department inputs “Male” and another “M” under the same heading, reports crafted to include the information for customers under the “Male” designation will ignore the equally valuable information about customers under the “M” designation. By maintaining consistency across the board, your company will be able to get the information you need, when you need it.

Once you know what you’re looking for and have good data going into your business intelligence system, you can step back and let your system do what it was designed to do. You’ll find that your key decision makers will have to rely less and less on their instincts as they continue to get useful information from their business intelligence reports. By taking just a few steps, you can improve the way your company uses your BI investment.

Take a look at this sales dashboard for an online book seller. It is created using Actuate. You can learn more about Actuate dashboards here.

Yes, I agree that the quality of the data and the goals of your analysis are critical to getting actionable, accurate information from your BI system. I would take a slightly different angle about the Business Intelligence versus Intuition subject and frame it as “Business Intelligence Powers Intuition”.

The following book was brought to my attention regarding Business Intelligence and Intuition:

Climbing the Ladder of Business Intelligence: Happy About Creating Excellence through Enabled Intuition

One of the authors, James E. Cates, has a presentation titled Ladder of Business Intelligence (LOBI) with an brief introduction of the framework offered in the book.

Here are some interesting images from the presentation.

As you will see the 10 levels on the Ladder of Business Intelligence are:

1. Facts
2. Data
3. Information
4. Knowledge
5. Understanding
6. Enabled Intuition

A definite take-away would be that business intelligence dashboards are tools that we deploy to enable corporations to achieve the ultimate goal of enlightened intuition. This end state allows solid data and valid interpretation to power business intuition.

Do you think Business Intelligence leads to Business Intuition?

Tags: Actuate Dashboards, Business Intelligence Dashboards

Dashboard designer and SAS/GRAPH expert Robert Allison walks us through the thinking behind his latest dashboard - a sales throughput dashboard complete with LED meters. Thank you Robert!

Dashboard Spy, a while back, you featured a sales dashboard with LED-meters . It measured sales order throughput and was accompanied by some negative commentary from Stephen Few.

Your readers may recall Stephen Few’s comments and his opinion that the display was poor :

“Enormous effort was dedicated to the creation of display widgets that look like controls that you might find on an old electronic control board, such as one for mixing sound. Most of the measures were designed to look like LED (liquid emitting diode) meters, with tall stacks of green, yellow, or red light horizontal bands of light set in a framework of burnished metal. Old audio mixers used LED meters because that was the state of the art, the best that technology could offer at the time, but a computer screen is capable of displays that are light years beyond and much easier to read than LED meters.”

Being a part-time DJ, with lots of audio equipment that has LED-meters – this “poor” dashboard always caught my eye, and I’ve always had it in the back of my mind to try to do a “decent” version of a dashboard that uses these retro LED-meters (with SAS/Graph, of course!). Well, I finally got around to it!

Hopefully my version is visually captivating *and* conveys the data in a fairly decent manner. You can try it out at http://robslink.com/SAS/democd37/throughput.htm.

Once I got into it, I found that the LED-meters aren’t really that bad a design. They’re actually a lot like a bullet graph. For example the red & yellow lines are like the ‘range’ colors behind the bullet bars, and the lighted section is like the bar (especially in my slightly-modified version). And, if I really wanted, I could add a “target” marker, making it even more like a bullet graph.

Here are my specific improvements, which hopefully make this an acceptable dashboard:

• Per the LED-meters … I made the lighted section of the LED-meters a *lot* brighter, and made it where you can distinctly see that the lighted section is a bar chart ‘bar’. Also, it took quite a bit of scrutinizing the values to determine that all the bars across the page were to the same scale, and that the scale went from 0-1000. Therefore, I added an axis to the left, showing the min & max values to make this more obvious.
• Rather than using a gauge to show the total number of orders, I just write the total number where the gauge was (and I write it *really* big!) This way, you can easily see that number, from many feet away (this could be useful if the dashboard is on display for a group, rather than being looked at by one user on their own screen).
• I couldn’t read the text in the original dashboard very easily (maybe it was a resized screen-capture?), so I made mine larger, with larger/bolder text.
• And, in case you still can’t read the values printed above the LED-meter bars, I added html charttip/hover-text so you can see the exact value that way. (I also added drilldown capability to the bars, although I don’t have any more-detailed data to really drill down to.) And in case you don’t know what ‘Jeop.’ means … you can hover over that bar, and find that this is the number of Orders that are in “Jeopardy” … html charttips are kinda handy!
• Rather than cluttering the dashboard with visually distracting select lists (and a rotary knob to select a time ‘period’ … which seems redundant with the select list for choosing beginning/ending date), I merely print the selected values on the dashboard, and let the user click on any of those values to take them to the selection screen to let them change those values.
• Why does a dashboard need an analog clock (with no numbers) cluttering the bottom/right? … I will assume that most Windows users have a clock somewhere on their screen, if they want one (personally, I keep the default digital clock at the bottom/right of my screen).
• And, rather than using a “burnished metal” look with reflective shading, I went with simpler solid colors. And I used black, rather than shades of dark green – this way, I have a higher contrast with the white text, making it easier to read, and there is no confusion between green LED bars and a green background.

Best Regards,
Robert A

Tags: SAS/GRAPH Dashboard, Sales Dashboard, Order Throughput Dashboard, LED Meter Dashboards

“SAS/GRAPH for great dashboards - Can SAS really do that?” Yes. If you license BASE SAS and SAS/GRAPH, you may already own the most powerful dashboard software in the world. You would never know it from the examples published by the SAS Institute, but SAS/GRAPH can render virtually any graphical display with high resolution and great fidelity to the design.

That’s the provocative start to a great post by Dashboard Spy reader, Neil Dulohery of Whitmarsh Associates as part of his blog, AutomateBI.

We’ve seen some wonderful examples of SAS/GRAPH dashboards by long-time Dashboard Spy contributor Robert Allison, but until now, he’s been practically alone in his pursuits. We’re glad to see our ranks of SAS/GRAPH dashboarders swell!

Take a look at the manufacturing dashboard provided by Neil Dulohery. It monitors the procurement of raw materials:

As Neil explained to me “Here is a manufacturing dashboard to monitor procurement of raw materials. The Lincoln Mill is fictional. All of the information is simulated. The real project in production for a number of manufacturing plants across the U.S. The project was developed in SAS/GRAPH, version 9.2. It is deployed as a set of interlinked web pages that refresh at 30 minute intervals. Users can drill down from dashboard indicators to supporting detail. My original post explaining the dashboard is available at SAS/GRAPH for Great Dashboards.

Here are some excerpts from his post explaining his dashboard. Be sure to visit Neil’s post to get the full details.

In Stephen Few’s Book, Information Dashboard Design, all of the designs he proposes can be fully automated in SAS with excellent visual fidelity. One can further enrich the user experience in SAS/GRAPH with customizable, context-sensitive tool tips that appear when hovering over any feature of the dashboard. Drill-down is possible from any context, including individual data points, whole graphs, an any other dashboard feature. The behind-the-scenes engines for data access and analysis enable the most sophisticated merging, processing, and refinement of information before presentation.

The dashboard below was adapted from one recently placed into production for a manufacturer with plants across the United States. The purpose is to monitor the process of procuring and delivering raw materials. These dashboards were developed in cooperation with local and corporate procurement managers. The intent of the project was to improve awareness of how the organization was performing relative to its own targets and recent history.

The most common comment I heard from this group is that they simply had never seen so much of the information they need presented in one place before. Speaking of one of the drill-down views, a procurement manager said that while other aspects of the dashboard were only 3 or 4 times better than anything he had seen before, that particular view was 1,000 times better because it put everything he needed to know about the subject onto a single page. The word, “Holy Grail,” was even mentioned. That remark lead me to believe that dramatic perceptual gains are indeed possible when a lot of related information is presented in a single well designed view.

Tags: SAS/GRAPH Dashboard, sas dashboards, manufacturing dashboard, procurement dashboards

Personal finance widgets and calculators are commonplace on web applications, but are sometimes awkwardly presented in terms of layout on a page. Typically, they are relegated to page sidebars, collected vertically on a resources page, or displayed by themselves on a single page. How about considering the dashboard design pattern as a solution?

By grouping relevant financial widgets together on a dashboard, this “My Bank” page from ABN AMRO serves as a user-centric dashboard for their banking customers. The user can configure the page and select the calculators, utilities and content modules most useful to them. By offering a personal dashboard that’s configured by the customer as a launch point, there is built-in loyalty and adoption.

In effect, the above dashboard is a “mashup” of ABN AMRO banking widgets and content. While not offering access to content outside of the bank, this dashboard is similar in spirit as it allows the user to select personalized modules of interest.

Tags: Banking dashboard, widget configuration, financial dashboard

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 configuration at all and not too many users complain.

On the other hand, other dashboards, by their nature, encourage a high degree of user configuration. BI reporting type dashboards, of course, allow changing of query parameters, selection of charts, etc. Putting analysis aside, there are dashboards that encourage quite a bit of user personalization. Mashup dashboards, by definition, allow users to select modules (widgets, gadgets, portlets - call them what you want!). Users will always go through a series of trials of different content and layouts before finding a satisfactory configuration. The challenge with these types of dashboards is to come up with a design that is intuitive to use and encourages exploration. The obvious requirement is that it should be very easy to change your content.

RIA (Rich Internet Applications) dashboards feature various ways to accomplish this such as drag and drop, configuration screens, etc. Sometimes, however, the simplest way is the best way. Take a look at this dashboard screenshot.

Rather than send the user to a separate configuration page, this mashup dashboard simply presents a series of checkboxes at the bottom of the page. Clicking a content selection instantly populates the dashboard with the desired content. A simple and easy-to-understand design solution for page configuration.

Try the page out for yourself at www.kpnvandaag.nl. It’s a Dutch site, so don’t ask me to comment on the content! It’s a typical RIA portal (think iGoogle or MyYahoo). The site is powered by a lightweight RIA portal solution called Backbase Rich Portal.

Tags: Dashboard Design, RIA Dashboards, Ajax dashboard, Mashups

Even before the hectic events in the financial markets, 2008 was an eventful year for those of us in business intelligence. We saw adoption of the dashboard design paradigm accelerate, interesting developments in the dashboard product space and the growing sophistication of business dashboard user interface design. What we can be assured of in 2009 is that our space will continue to be exciting.

The business world in general, and the BI professional in particular, finds the arrival of 2009 bringing with it the combined blessing and curse of “interesting times”. While exchanging New Year’s greetings with many Dashboard Spy readers and contributors, I found certain “top-of-mind” topics appearing on everyone’s list. In this post, I share 5 of what will most certainly be the hottest topics of discussion when discussing business intelligence dashboards in 2009.

Dashboard Topic #1

“Business Intelligence, the recession-proof application”

Corporate spending has ground to a halt. This has impacted in a dramatic way the world of IT where, even in the best of times, we have to work hard at proving ROI and business justification. IT managers now are scraping by with reduced staff and application funding. However, I’ve received reports from quite a few organizations where business intelligence dashboard budgets survive. In fact, a few new dashboard reporting projects received the go-ahead despite cutbacks on other technology spending.

Does this indicate that business intelligence tools are recession-proof? Are BI applications the rare “bull in the bear market” because BI is finally recognized as the tool that companies rely on to measure and track their way out of hard economic times?

As some savvy Dashboard Spies over at LogiXML write in a post titled “Business Intelligence in a Recession: a Luxury or a Smart Investment?“, whether or not BI is recession-proof in a certain company depends on the perceived value of BI within that company. There are basically 2 kinds of companies:

1. The kind for whom BI is a bit like an amulet–just wear it around your organization’s neck and things may start looking up again.
2. The kind who views BI for what it is: a tool. To be useful, tools have to have a specific purpose. If the strategy is to go on the offensive and gain market share, then BI is to this purpose what a hammer is to a nail.

For the first kind of company, BI may end up being a luxury. Analyst firm Gartner states that only five to ten percent of companies actually get into BI with a clear strategy, which means that many organizations unfortunately fall within this category.

For the second kind of company, BI becomes a way to achieve the goal of gaining market share through a solid command of their vertical - which means a clear understanding of their data. So as they implement BI, every effort is carefully aimed towards this purpose - and the chances of success skyrocket.

Naturally, buying only as much BI as you need and ensuring that you don’t have to beef up your IT team to implement it and maintain it is a way to ensure that your investment is smart.

How recession-proof are business intelligence dashboards in your company? There is no doubt of the need to quickly and accurately measure and track your company metrics in order to formula a response in this time of crisis. But can you actually take advantage of this need to make your BI budget not only survive but thrive?

As Shadan Malik, CEO of iDashboards, commented:

It is very clear that 2009 will bring pared down budgets, requiring businesses to do more with less. There will be more pressure for people to produce and demonstrate their worth. To ensure businesses remain on track during this turbulent time, affordable BI tools, specifically visual reporting tools designed to provide the insight needed for quick intelligent decision-making, will be in high demand.

This will bring about an increase in the deployment of affordable, bolt-on dashboard software. Because dashboards offer a representation of the state of the business, they not only provide the management team with insight into the bottom line, but they also give other staff a view of the top line. This bi-directional system will ensure complete visibility into the data and that all transparency polices are followed properly.

These tools will also be used for another form of business intelligence, employee performance. Systems once deployed only to monitor forecasts and actuals will now be used to show individuals their achievements, allowing organizations to track employee success against predetermined business goals, fostering a “culture of individual accountability.”

Moving forward, we will see greater personalization and customization in how data is presented, as information assets will be more readily available to every worker at all layers of the organization. Access to actionable data, will transform how organizations strive to meet goals and enhance their ability in setting them.

The idea of greater personalization and customization brings us to my second “hot” dashboard topic for 2009.

Dashboard Topic #2

“The Power of The Mash-Up Dashboard”

Remember what Metcalfe, one of the ethernet inventors, said about networks? He had a formula for expressing the power of the “network effect” where the value of the network increases exponential when more users join the network. We are seeing this power come into the realm of the enterprise dashboard with the boom in the availability and promotion of RSS, APIs and other technologies and licensing agreements for the unfettered sharing of data from countless providers across the world. As more and more providers offer their data, the network effect will ensure greater participation. 2009 will be a break out year for mashup dashboarding.

The mashup dashboard takes a mix and match approach to enterprise dashboard content that provides a real user-centric focus. Think combination of business intelligence applications, reporting engines and web portals.

In 2009, more companies than ever will make their databases and application engines available for use across the internet. While TOS (Terms of Service) agreements will be in effect, the access to the data is generally granted at no cost. This has opened the world of the enterprise dashboard and made the dashboard design pattern a smorgashboard of content from a range of data providers. This “mash-up” of content serves up unique combinations of dashboard content for the ever-hungry dashboard end user. Once they’ve tasted the mash-up dashboard, there’s no going back.

Kevin Yin, CEO of SitScape, a company specializing in a software product that allows dashboard end users to create their own mashup dashboards from web sources, took time out from demo’ing his product at the Red Herring Global 2009 Tech Start-up Show to answer a few questions from the Dashboard Spy:

Spy: Why is the Mash-Up Dashboard becoming such a trend now?

Kevin: It is a natural evolution with the mix of the following ideas : the maturity of technologies, end user’s mindset and expectations, and the impact of the advancement of the consumer Web 2.0 world. The enterprise user now demands those approaches as well. The kind of projects or capabilities
that typically required 6 month or 1-year project to do by a company’s engineering team or consulting
firms are now expected to be done in a much faster time frame. And incorporating the latest advances in a personalized user interface that offers improved productivity, faster decision making and extraordinary business value.

Spy: That’s a lot to ask. Is the technology behind this approach very complicated?

Kevin: It might be, but the software should hide the complexity so users will not feel it. We must empower the dashboard end user to do what they want to do much faster and easier. A good example is the evolution of sending messages. When first using telegrams or letters, the expenses were quite high. But because it provided such value, the demand grew over the years and technology eventually made it pervasive. Think now of email, SMS and blogs and how easy, low cost, on-demand and personalized communication is. Enterprise dashboard technology needs to move to that direction.

The approach that Kevin’s company took to creating a unique mash-up dashboard for each business end user can be seen in how his Situational Dashboard Assembler software enables a mashup of live components from web applications. Simply indicate what live data sources you want on your mashup dashboard, and presto!

Dashboard Topic #3

“The Unavoidable Dashboard” or “Here Come the Widgets!”

We are seeing very interesting developments in dashboard software. Things that we take for granted, such as where to place a dashboard (web-based, rich client, etc) are being called into question.

For organizations to achieve real returns on their business intelligence efforts, there is one startlingly simple requirement - “Get the data in front of the manager”. This data visibilty has become a real challenge in today’s hyperactive management environment. When the typical executive is bombarded with reports to study, phones to answer and emails to scan, even clicking on an icon or typing in the URL of their business intelligence system becomes too much to ask. Sounds silly, I know, but it’s true.

The challenge then becomes how to make our dashboards “unavoidable” so that busy managers can’t ignore the signals from our KPIs and metrics?

From the forward edge of business dashboard techniques comes the idea of desktop dashboards. With the end user now getting comfortable with widgets and gadgets (those mini applications that appear on your PC or Mac as part of the windows environment), we will see more and more adoption of this technique to deliver business intelligence.

Allan Wille, CEO of Klipfolio, a leader in the desktop dashboard space, offers some insight into the advantages of placing the dashboard right on the desktop:

Spy: Did you say that there are 3 really important things in business intelligence dashboards?

Allan: Yes, location, location, location! Actually, there are indeed several key principles in BI dashboards and one of them is the Rule of Placement. The idea is to make the KPIs unavoidable. Why not place them right on the desktop so that they load right away when the end user boots up. There is no sense in asking the busy executive to launch a browser to log in to a BI app or click on an application icon.

Editor’s note: See The 3 Rules of Dashboarding for a discussion of The Rule of Placement, The Rule of Design and The Rule of Accuracy.

Spy: So the user doesn’t even have to explicitly log into their business intelligence application?

Allan: Right. In fact, application adoption is another reason why companies are adopting desktop dashboards. If you go through the effort of launching a major BI product and no one winds up using it for whatever reason, that’s a really bad thing. So what you can do is provide a desktop dashboard that surfaces KPIs and metrics from that BI application and let’s the users link through to the application when they notice something of interest on the desktop dashboard. So the desktop dashboard can complement that CRM, making it easier for the data to be displayed so people don’t have to log in, they don’t have to go to various tabs or different Web pages to see the data. Everything is basically there in front of them without them having to do anything. Furthermore, we can then simplify the interaction between the dashboard and the Web based system. So for example, they can initiate a lead right from the desktop or they can change the status on a certain opportunity right from the desktop without having to log in.

Spy: Using the desktop as BI real estate seems obvious but I can’t claim that I would have ever thought of it myself.

Allan: We use a side bar approach. It does offer additional real estate, but the nature of it forces the companies to prioritize their KPIs and metrics. If you have a side bar on the right side of your computer, you basically have a fifth or a sixth of your desktop real estate that you are playing with – this mandates that customers have to choose the most important information to put on the desktop. We’re finding that our customers go through the exercise of identifying “what is the key data?”, “what is it important for our customers to see?” and more importantly “what is not important for employees to bother with?” to great benefit.

Editor’s note: Allan’s company, Serence, rebranded itself as Klipfolio after the name of its desktop dashboard. Check them out at www.klipfolio.com.

Dashboard Topic #4

“The Eye Candy Controversy, Continued”

Several dashboarding platforms released upgrades during 2008 that take graphics to a new level. Flash-based bling and web 2.0 styling is here to stay. “Create your own dashboard” software now makes it extremely easy to add all the glitz and chrome you want to your business intelligence interface. Project sponsors who want to show slickness love this functionality but the information visualization best practice crowd is choking on their pie charts and loading up their bullet graphs. The “eye candy” versus “clarity of data visualization” controversy will no doubt continue to grow in 2009.

2008 was a strong year for the information visualization and charting crowd with many dashboards adopting best practice techniques such as sparklines, bullet charts and monochromatic color schemes. Look at the various business dashboard contests and you’ll find the top contenders all sporting similar aesthetics. See the Best Excel Dashboard of 2008 for a typical sparkline-based dashboard.

In the other corner, gleefully bouncing around between rounds with the frustrated information visualization gurus are the cheerful masses. To say they are thrilled with their new found graphic power would be the understatement of 2008. With click and drag ease, they are filling their dashboard portlets with slick-looking graphs that shine and reflect light. It seems that ocassional the right chart gets selected but that almost seems to be beside the point.

As a dashboard adoption observer and business intelligence industry reporter, I will state my opinion that at this point of the maturity curve of business dashboards, it’s great that the dashboard end user or department level dashboard builder has the technology available to produce great looking visual interfaces for business intelligence. Yes, there are plenty of “wrong” practices out there, but I’d rather enjoy this frenzy of do-it-yourself dashboarding than to wait forever for IT and their data visualization experts to get something “right”.

Let me also state that the eye candy is not soley the result of end-user produced / dashboard platform-based dashboards. With the common availabilty of flash-based charting components such as the nicely designed ones from fusioncharts.com, the latest generation of in-house, custom developed dashboards also shine and sparkle when it comes to charts.

Our dashboards have never looked this nice. But is this coming at a cost? Consult your local data visualization expert.

Dashboard Topic #5

“The Rise of the InfoGraphic”

2008 was a banner year for infographics. I mean that literally. News sites such as the New York Times have set up considerable resources for the production and prominent display of data-driven information graphics. As explained in this interview with the NY Times Graphics Director Steve Duenes, information graphics are taken quite seriously.

Visually, information graphics typically look exactly like the business dashboards that we study at The Dashboard Spy. I would guess that for many newspaper readers, these infographics are the first interaction they have had with what we call business dashboards. Some very popular infographic dashboards from 2008 include:

• NY Times Olympic Medal Count
• NY Times Popup Election Dashboard
• NY Times Analysis of State of the Union Address (actually from 2007)

For an expert’s view of infographics, I’ll point to you my favorite article of 2008 on infograhics. It’s by information visualization ace Stephen Few and it’s an article titled “Infographics - It’s Time to Put Them to the Test“.

From his analysis:

It is definitely true that, when trying to communicate certain information, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” As technologies such as television, video games, and the Internet fill our lives with increasing amounts of visual content, the potential of visualization is now taken for granted. The question remains, however, “Are we using this visual language effectively?”

This form and use of visualization has become popular in the last few years. We now see frequent examples of infographics in major news publications. I’ve seen examples that work to communicate effectively, but more that, in my opinion, do not. What accounts for these differences in the effectiveness of infographics?

I believe infographics have great potential, but their effectiveness must be honed through empirical study. Infographics practitioners must become more introspective, more critical of their work, if they wish to give something useful to the world. Most of the infographics that I’ve seen are filled with what Tufte calls “chartjunk.” Why are we still producing chartjunk?

His article is thought provoking and well worth reading. Read up, because infographics are definitely here to stay and will become even more adopted by the media in 2009. The public will be hard pressed to differentiate between data-driven infographic applications and business dashboards. For that matter, so am I.

New Year’s Resolution for The Dashboard Spy

At the start of 2009, I feel confident that no matter what occurs during the year, there will be plenty to study and learn from in terms of dashboard examples and best practices. I’ve personally spent the last few years collecting, collating and commenting on business intelligence dashboards and can tell you that the dashboard as a design paradigm is poised to really break out. We will see a dashboard page as part of every corporate application. In fact, it’s finally dawning on everybody that the dashboard is the perfect home page.

I’d like to thank all the Dashboard Spy readers who have helped the Dashboard Spy network of business intelligence resources grow. It’s through your contributions and examples of BI dashboards that have powered the growth of my sites. I’ve seen plenty of Dashboard Spy impersonators spring up with their own dashboard example sites and I welcome the growth in the space. It’s through sharing with the dashboarding and business intelligence community that we all continue to learn what the real best practices are.

My resolution for 2009 is to really light a fire in the business intelligence dashboards space and grow the Dashboard Spy community and resources. I’ll work hard at allowing the readers to directly contribute content themselves. I’ve acquired the domain dashboards.org and will be launching a community-driven resource that will allow you to contribute and share your dashboards with ease. I’ll be networking and really driving the community aspects. For that, I’ve decided to drop my “secret identity”. It served me well when people were reluctant to share their dashboards and were comforted by the ego-free approach that I took. That was years ago and, today, sharing dashboard screenshots is common place.

My name is Hubert Lee and I’m The Dashboard Spy. I look forward to interacting with you personally. You can send me a LinkedIn connection invite to this personal address: . Just let me know that you are a Dashboard Spy reader. Feel free to make contact. I’m sure we’ve got lots to talk about. Also, I’ve got podcasting on my mind, so if you’re willing to be interviewed for an upcoming series of podcasts, let me know.

Good luck in 2009 and Happy Dashboarding!

Warm regards from Hubert Lee, The Dashboard Spy

Be sure to check out the following Dashboard Spy sites:

http://dashboardsbyexample.com
http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com
http://dashboards.tv
http://dashboardspy.com
http://dashboards.org
http://businessintelligence.tradepub.com
http://enterprise-dashboard.tradepub.com

Stay tuned for more!

Tags: Dashboard Software