Enterprise Dashboard Digest

The best way to compare the relative merits of one dashboard platform to another is to build the same business intelligence dashboard in both technologies. That way, you get to experience the strengths and weaknesses of the various software products and technologies.

Now, to really get a sense of what each software product brings to the table, one should not merely try to replicate the dashboard pixel for pixel. Rather, start right from the beginning (remember that pesky user requirements phase?) and see if you can apply a unique solution to some of the data visualization challenges at hand. That way you can identify those unique value adds that certain platforms offer. Maybe one package is better at charting, or perhaps another is best at interactive controls.

The dashboard software vendors do this exercise all the time. Let’s take a look, for example, at the workflow that Robert Allison of SAS uses. Robert is a real pro at using SAS/GRAPH and has compared his platform against many others. He’ll often take a look at a dashboard example from another vendor and replicate it for competitive intelligence purposes.

Let’s first look at a typical target dashboard. Here is a dashboard from the Visual Mining NetCharts reporting platform:

NetCharts Dashboard

The NetCharts dashboard is meant for use to track a fundraising effort. It has sections that measure metrics relevant to a non-profit organization:

• Dollar Cost YTD
• Cost to Raise a Dollar
• Fundraising Event Calendar
• Campaign Costs
• Revenue Detail
• Expense Detail

 There is one big table, a couple of bar charts with line graph overlays, a gantt chart and a dial.

Now here is what Robert Allison did with SAS/GRAPH:

SAS Dashboard

Robert provides commentary on his exercise which you can read on his SAS fundraising dashboard summary. Here is a small excerpt of his thinking:

I started with data from examples on the iDashes website…
http://www.visualmining.com/developers/application-examples.shtml
And then tried to make a dashboard that was more functional
than theirs   I have changed the data somewhat so that my
chart does not get into copyright infringement… 

Since my schedule of fundraising events was kinda basic/simple,
and didn’t have any dependencies, I chose to represent it with a
clever bar chart rather than ‘proc gantt’ (also, you only need a
sas/graph license to do it with a bar chart, rather than needing
sas/or).  The ‘clever’ part is that each event is really 2 bar
segments — an ‘invisible’ white one that extends from time=0
(ie, the dawn of sas time in 1960) and then the blue segment that
starts and stops at the begin and end time of the event.
The html charttips/flyover-text are particularly helpful here,
to see the dates of the event.

Thanks Robert for the peek at how you “test” out your platform/technology against others in the market place. We’ll look for more of your examples in future posts here.

Tags: Dashboard Technologies, Reporting Platform Comparison, Business Intelligence Bake Off, Dashboard Vendors, Dashboard Design, SAS/GRAPH, NetCharts Dashboards