Enterprise Dashboard Digest

First! Ahh, the Dashboard Spy loves to scoop the big business intelligence news outlets! Stick that in your content management systems, you big publishers – this little ole blogger’s got ya beat!

Here’s the story – Klipfolio Dashboard is going to be releasing a new version that let’s you build, share and monitor your real-time KPIs on any device. I’m talking web, mobile, iphones, ipads, etc.

Here’s a graphic that show the idea:

Pretty pictures – but the real story is that you can possibly get an early beta key and be a tester. I’m trying to get a key myself.

Go here and sign up:

http://www.klipfolio.com/kpi-dashboard/beta

Not sure of the time frame. Check out their facebook page for some teaser stuff.

This is exciting.

This example of a scorecard is very very interesting. I call it a typical dashboard rather than a scorecard because of its layout and lack of balanced scorecard orientation. However, I understand why it’s called the scorecard, because it literally allows people to score or rank their clients. So actually this “Client Scorecard” is literally a way of letting consultants score their clients. It’s an interesting project from the Freelancers Union of which I am a member. Take a look at this screenshot and then I’ll provide the link to the page.

In terms of design, I really like how there is a banner underneath the title that says “Have you loved/loathed a company that you freelanced for?”

Take a look at the scorecard for yourself here:

Freelancers Union Client Scorecard

Here’s a behind the scenes look at this scorecard project.

Members received the following e-mail asking for feedback on the project:

Here’s the e-mail they sent out asking for input on the new feature:

We’re tackling the problem of clients and companies who don’t pay from all angles. We’re building practical solutions to this problem, and our members are leading the way.

Now, you have an opportunity to shape a new tool that will help you and your fellow freelancers: the Client Scorecard. Once it’s live, you’ll use the Client Scorecard to scout out every new client and to report back after every gig.

Please take this short survey—the results will help us build the tool and make sure that it meets your needs. In the coming weeks, you’ll have opportunities to get more involved by rating clients and spreading the word to other freelancers.

Thanks for your involvement in creating this new tool. With your help, we’re looking to address the problems freelancers face—from unpaid wages to unfair taxation—to make freelance fair.

Members helping members while helping themselves. It looks like self-interest, but smells like patchouli.

Best,

Advocacy and Policy Director

Unfortunately, the survey has since been taken down and I didn’t save it.

Take a look at this screenshot of a homepage dashboard created in Facebook. The creator wanted to has a page on Facebook that he used as a launch point for all the different tools that he used on a regular basis. It saves him time by having it all in one spot. Look closely and you’ll see that these are the most popular websites that use is on the day-to-day basis to run his business. Some are personal, some are key business suppliers, and others are business tools.

The author has kindly created a video in response to a question from somebody who wanted to know exactly how he created this dashboard in Facebook. He actually describes two separate methods. Have a look:

Screenshots of business dashboards are heavily used in dashboard documentation such as help files and user documentation. Especially with business intelligence dashboards, a picture is worth 1000 words of description. With all that goes on with complex dashboard layouts and screen regions, there is simply no way to describe a dashboard screen without the use of screen capture.

Take a look at this layout and note the use of a lightbox-based technology to pop up large dashboard screenshots when you click on the matching thumbnail. Use this link to give it a try for yourself.

Dashboard thumbnail popups

I rather like this design solution and how it lets you browse to what you want while using minimal space. The large “plus sign” graphic works well to inform the user that they should click on the image to magnify it. I could also see the use of a magnifying glass icon instead of the plus sign.

Of course this design solution is suitable for screen-based this place and not paper-based support documents or paper-based manuals.

A lot of you Dashboard Spy by readers out there use Microsoft Excel heavily as part of your everyday work activities. I know that there is some real power users out there but also many of you who have never taken Excel to that truly advanced level. Dashboard spy reader Chandoo has announced that he’ll be closing registration soon for his online VBA training tutorial and I wanted to bring this to the attention of my readership before he closes the doors.

What’s covered in this Excel VBA training? Take a look:

Automating the work you do in Excel is an important problem, and almost everyone has it. By using Excel VBA, you can automate several areas of your data analysis, reporting and modeling work.

VBA Classes are for you, if you,

• Make repetitive reports, dashboards or slides and looking for ways to automate
• Want to learn VBA to understand and use Excel better
• Want to use Excel for more powerful & demanding tasks
• Or just curious & want to learn something new about Excel

To learn more about Chandoo’s Excel VBA training, click on this link:

http://budurl.com/excelvba

Dashboard spy readers know how much I hate the explicit reference of a business dashboard to the metaphor of an automobile dashboard. It’s a hackneyed story that seems to always be trotted out when trying to introduce the concept of a business intelligence dashboard to an audience of new users. When the United States government launched the United States education dashboard to a broad audience, of course, they trotted out how it’s very much like an automobile dashboard. Thankfully they didn’t go on and on about it and spared us the use of any graphics related to a steering wheel or gauges.

Take a look at the USA Education Dashboard:

You can view the USA education dashboard at this link:

http://dashboard.ed.gov

The dashboard starts with a welcome screen that explains Pres. Obama’s goal that by 2020 the United States will have one of the worlds highest percentage of college graduates in the world. The page explains that in order to reach the goal, comprehensive education reforms must be made. The US Department of Education presents the dashboard to inform conversations about improving educational results and monitoring the United States progress towards accomplishing these objectives.

One good thing about the United States education dashboard is that it provides the user with a lot of background about the dashboard. Obviously, for political reasons, the use of the dashboard for tracking and improvement of the educational system is given the highest priority. So they put in a lot of effort into promoting and explaining the reasons why the dashboard project exists.

Take a look at this link for examples of what I mean: http://dashboard.ed.gov/about.aspx

Does your dashboard have an about page?

It’s lengthy (as nothing is ever short in Washington!). Here’s an excerpt:

WHAT’S IN THE DASHBOARD?

The Dashboard presents indicators in 4 areas that are critical to improving educational results and achieving the President’s 2020 college attainment goal. Here are the areas, and some of the key questions the Dashboard can help answer:

THE PRESIDENT’S 2020 COLLEGE ATTAINMENT GOAL

Goal: By 2020, the United States will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

How the Dashboard Reports on Progress:
Are students graduating from college in sufficient numbers to reach the President’s goal?

EARLY LEARNING THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL

Goal: To ensure that students are on track to graduate from high school on time and ready for college and careers.

How the Dashboard Reports on Progress:

Do our young children have access to preschool programs?
Are K-12 students’ achievement levels on track to prepare them for college and careers?
Are our children graduating from high school on time and ready for college and careers?

POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Goal: To increase college access, quality, and completion by strengthening higher education and lifelong learning opportunities.

How the Dashboard Reports on Progress:
Are young adults enrolled in college or other postsecondary training?
Are postsecondary students graduating on time?
Is a sufficient number of college students obtaining the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills that our country needs to remain internationally competitive?
Are we offering all Americans the opportunity to attend college and offering affordable options?

TEACHERS AND LEADERS
Goal: To improve preparation, recruitment, development, evaluation, and rewarding of effective teachers and principals.

How the Dashboard Reports on Progress:
Is student learning a factor in teacher and principal evaluations?
Do high school teachers have the content knowledge needed to teach their specific subject?
AN EXCELLENT EDUCATION FOR ALL

This dashboard example features a social media conversation dashboard. It’s basically a brand monitoring dashboard that crawls social media platforms such as Facebook or twitter as well as user forums of various kinds. The intent of the dashboard is to provide marketers with a synopsis of the discussions occurring as well as the tone of those discussions.

Interestingly, the makers of this dashboard realized that social media conversations occur worldwide and in many languages. The engine behind this dashboard relies on the work of translators around the world that monitor conversations in many languages and presents an all-in-one dashboard.

This new social media monitoring dashboard is called Unity and is newly released by Synthesio.

Tags: Social Media Conversation Dashboard

I hate to amended, but I must say that every dashboard project I’ve been on has been late. Whether it’s because these projects are often first time forays into business intelligence projects for the clients, or because these organizations were just not ready for the governance and project management issues involved, The fact remains that significant numbers of very late dashboard projects abound.

Take a look at the delayed projects report shown at the Washington State transportation improvement board. There is a nice downtrend over this timeframe that speaks to improvement in project management for sure.

What interests me also is that there is a big difference between projects that are late and projects that are reported to the board as late. Of course, this is nothing unusual. In fact you should not bother the board with every little detail of the project and there are many reasons, quite legitimate, why the board does not need to know certain details.

By the way to check out the TIB GMAP performance management dashboard at this link as it is a model to follow for management transparency. I commented on this performance dashboard years ago but have not mentioned it as of late. It’s quite worth visiting. I forget where I read this, but I understand that the system was built for a total of $40,000. That’s quite a return on investment I would say.

The Washington State TIB GMAP Dashboard

Tags: Enterprise Dashboard Project Delays

In this dashboard example post, we look at the realtime business analytics dashboard called Geckoboard. It just officially launched, but we’ve been watching this widget-driven dashboard closely it while it’s been in beta.

Businesses these days have quite an extraordinary amount of data to look at. Most companies track web analytics, marketing metrics, e-mail statistics, customer support numbers, project management issues and much much more. And that’s just the marketing department!

Now that dashboards are popular, management is finding that they have multiple dashboards to log into and monitor. This can make dashboard adoption slowdown and companies are looking for dashboard consolidation techniques.

This particular dashboard example features a drag-and-drop interface and allows business owners a real-time view of their entire operation. Take a look at the screenshot and you’ll see that it’s largely text driven with key metrics highlighted via the sizing of the font and color indicating alert status.

This dashboard is customizable and is comprised of collection of widgets. Each widget represents data from possibly different data sources. Much of the metrics is website analytic centric with sources such as Google analytics, social media tracking, project information from base camp and similar, and other popular web analytics tools.

As this is a flash-free application it works on the iPad and iPhone here is a very cool product shot which stresses the point.

Interestingly the software has a “large screen mode” which makes it suitable for displaying on a large TV screen such as you would use in the lobby area of a company. As dashboards by readers know, I’ve highlighted a number of ways that companies broadcast their management transparency by encouraging consumption of enterprise dashboard data by everybody.

There is an interesting conversation going on about the pricing model of this dashboard. Take a look at this link, but it appears that right now the pricing model is based on a per device usage model. The company seems to be open to conversation about the pricing model so take a look at the discussion.

Geckoboard Pricing Model Discussion

Info on Launch of Real-time Business Metrics Dashboard – Geckoboard

Did you know that The Dashboard Spy has a direct pipeline into all the leading business intelligence white papers published by the major software vendors? Those readers in the know have been using this resource to score all sorts of helpful materials. In fact, it’s not just business intelligence white papers but rather a collection of all trade magazines white papers and other publications–all free for the asking. You just need to sign up.

Where is this resource? Use this link:

http://enterprise-dashboard.tradepub.com

Go there now and you’ll see that there are business magazines such as HR Magazine Oracle Magazine and profit magazine as well as free books from the site point publishers, and various business intelligence white papers.

For your convenience, I’ve pulled out five very interesting white papers and I’ve placed them at the top of the page. Titles include “The Road to Business Intelligence Success”, “10 Ways to use Twitter”, “Principles of Project Management”, “The Definitive Guide to Business Intelligence”, and “the Business Intelligence Best Practices Benchmark Report”.

All the papers, reports, magazines, and trade publications are available at no cost. You will have to provide details but, as many have reported, it’s well worth it. Using white papers as study material and trade magazines to keep abreast of developments in your niche focus, is especially important when it comes to learning the business drivers and hot buttons of senior management in your particular area. I personally found many materials that have advance my career through resources such as this.

The Dashboard Spy