Since we’ve been talking about the design of Business Intelligence Dashboards and the influence of Web 2.0, I want to make sure to stress that Web 2.o is NOT about the shiny look of the big buttons. Web 2.0 is not about what the page looks like. Yes, we studied some examples of a common design aesthetic that has emerged, but Web 2.0 is beyond that. Likewise, it is also not about the underlying technology. When we think of AJAX, DOM, CSS, et al, we really are thinking about RIA (Rich Internet Application) tools and not Web 2.0.

So what is Web 2.0 and why should we enterprise dashboard designers care about it?

The real essence of Web 2.0 is about the content and the role of the user. It’s more of a philosophy that puts the user in the center and let’s them create the application that they really want. It’s about empowering the users through collaboration with each other, letting them generate their own content and enriching their data from sources outside of the core data set. I’m sure you use web applications that embrace all sorts of user generated content techniques like voting, tagging, blogging, etc, but have you used applications that “mash” data from disparate services?

You may not think it’s a big deal, because you pull data from your corporate system silos all the time – Data warehousing, ETL, etc. But stop and consider that we are talking about data your company doesn’t own. Now you see that we are starting to take a bigger step. One of letting your users consume data that you didnt’ generate and can’t even totally vouch for.

Confused about what I mean? Check out this collection of mashups at Programmable Web and you’ll find dashboards that combine data from yahoo, google, amazon, ebay and other popular APIs.

Let’s look at a business dashboard example that came up the other day with a Dashboard Spy reader interested in enriching their IBM Websphere Portal Dashboard with content from Google.

First off, I pointed the websphere dashboard programmer to the IBM developerWorks tutorial: IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets: Using the inter portlet communication feature.

It walks you through how to set up gadgets on the portal dashboard that interact with events triggered in other portlets. For Websphere Portal, there is a portlet available that specifically lets you create portlets that display Google Gadgets. The tutorial explains how to create a mashup dashboard and set up inter portlet communication.

Here is a snippet of the portlet tutorial. It shows how to write a source portlet that drives the content in a target portlet with a Google Maps display. Pretty nifty functionality to put on your enterprise dashboard, no?

What Google Gadgets can be put on your IBM Portal Dashboard? There are plenty of Google Gadgets to choose from! Take a look at this next screenshot to see some of the available widgets that you can put into your portlets:

If you haven’t experienced the “mashup” style of content management and want to see if it’s something that your enterprise dashboard users would benefit from, simply set up an igoogle account and try it out for yourself. Pick some interesting gadgets that mash data from disparate APIs and see the interesting collaboration that can develop.

Tags: Dashboard Design, Web 2.0 Techniques for Enterprise Dashboards, Executive Dashboard, Mash-up Dashboarding, websphere dashboard