Lifecycle of a Business Intelligence Dashboard

One naturally assumes that the more mature a business intelligence dashboard gets, the more usage it gets and the more data it shows. But that isn't always the case. Interestingly, I have a great example of a dashboard that lately has gotten less informational.

"But how can that be?", you ask. Well, I'm talking about a dashboard that is meant to track a particular process, one that naturally narrows in terms of its focus. I'm talking about the very popular Yahoo Election 2008 Political Dashboard. Take a look at today's screenshot of the dashboard:



See what I mean? As the life cycle of this particular area of study matures, we'll get less range of data. Yes, we'll have more depth, but visually, we'll have to change the UI or else it will just look like a sparse matrix.

Excel Dashboard Tutorial

Note to all excel users interested in Excel Dashboard development - a new excel dashboard tutorial has just been released at this link:

http://budurl.com/exceldashboardlesson

All business intelligence dashboard practitioners are encouraged to watch that video lesson by Chandoo.


Update on this post about Excel Dashboard Tutorials: An excellent series of posts on how to use microsoft excel for dashboard reports has been posted on Dashboards By Example: Excel Dashboard Tutorials. The Dashboard Spy article includes links to sample excel dashboard worksheets that you can download.

As each version of Excel grows in features and visual sophistication, the product becomes a really compelling choice as a dashboarding platform. In my opinion, even if the functionality wasn't there (oh - but it is, especially in the Office 2007 version - very dashboard friendly!), Microsoft Excel is a must-consider choice simply because of the size of its user base.

This being the case, it behooves us dashboarders to understand the dashboarding capabilities of Excel.

What better way than to walk through a real hands-on workshop with an information visualization pro like Jorges Camoes? Check out his post titled "How to Create a Dashboard in Excel" and be sure to download and follow along with his tutorial.

Here is a screenshot of the dashboard you'll be creating. It's a Demographics Dashboard.

Web-based Project Management Dashboard

Here is a powerful way to manage distributed project management. Take a look at this screenshot from a product called Valleyspeak Project Server. Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge the dashboard screenshot.



This product allows the continued use of Microsoft Project while allowing the entire team to access the project status information from anywhere. Yes, of course you can take the approach of outfitting the entire team with licensed copies of MS Project, but this method allows one copy to power a browser-based version for everyone.

Tags: Project Management Dashboard

Dashboards in Microsoft CRM 3.0

A Microsoft CRM developer was telling me about his project to build some enterprise dashboards in Microsoft CRM. He showed me this post about CRM 3.0 dashboards.

Out of the box, there is no way to generate the dashboards that everyone is clamoring for. But, as the blog post linked to above shows, you can use the Microsoft CRM SDK to generate some very nice dashboards.

Here is a look at their very nice work. The charts are flash-based.

Security Dashboards

Dashboards for monitoring the status of network, web and email security are now common place. I can't think of many network security products that do not offer dashboards as the primary method of interacting with the end user.

Here are 2 dashboard screenshots of a security product.

You'll see liberal use of lights to show various states of key metrics.



Here is a closer look at one of the lower level pages:



Network Metrics Dashboard

Business Intelligence Dashboard Vendor Landscape Report

Do you know the top five BI tool vendors of 2006? The Dashboard Spy knows. He has done it again with this post about a recent IDC ranking of business intelligence tool vendors. How does he come up with such interesting reporting on dashboarding news? Yes, as the Spy said, this Dashboard Guy wants to be like the Dashboard Spy.

As provided by the Dashboard Spy, here is the link to the IDC report excerpt entitled "Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2006 Vendor Share". as provided by BI dashboard vendor SAS.

Here are the market share and revenue statistics of the business intelligence tool vendors:

Be sure to click on this image to enlarge it for legibility.

Dashboard for Tracking Video Stream Metrics

Executive Dashboards are built to visually impart a sense of key performance indicators. You get to "feel" how your business is doing. The "intuition" that you get from using an enterprise dashboard is often the result of the various gauges, dials, charts and graphics on the dashboard.

Sometimes, however, you really need to see line items of data on your dashboard. Summaries of various sales figures, totals of financials, etc. This is often best accomplished by displaying small tables on the dashboard.

Here is a good example of the mix of graphic and tabular content that can be used on a dashboard. This particular dashboard screenshot is of an application built to track the metrics of a site that delivers streaming video and audio. Obviously, it is critical that the site owners see the reach of their content distribution. It has charts, graphs and a map. Additionally, there are several portlets that are table-based. To help legibility, the rows feature alternate-row coloring.

Click on the dashboard to enlarge the screenshot.



Tags: Dashboard, Dashboard Design, Executive Dashboard