The Dashboard Spy

The Dashboard Spy has been thinking about the phrase “User Interface” in regards to business intelligence dashboards. What exactly do we mean when we say “User Interface”? What I’m getting at is that some dashboards have “real” interfaces - in which a business user can control the display (data domain, visualizations, charting options, etc), but other dashboards really don’t have any controls at all and simply communicate information.

Believe me, the old standby of a read-only dashboard is alive and well. A lot of dashboards are just reports with visual components. Now, before you say that those aren’t “real” dashboards, let me remind you that in the metaphor of an automotive dashboard, there isn’t much you actually do on that dashboard either. In a car, you adjust the car’s operation through controls located away from the dashboard. You simply look at it to see how much over the speed limit you were when you see the state trooper behind the bushes. You take action away from the dashboard (using the gas pedal to either slow down or speed away, depending on your tendencies).

In a plane, however, the dashboard, or cockpit, itself actually does have plenty of knobs, buttons and dials to adjust, so maybe the archetypical dashboard is a real “interface”.

But, do digital dashboards, act differently? Hmmm.

Rather than turn this into a “what is the difference between a dashboard and report and scorecard” discussion, let’s look at different ways that users “interface” with their dashboards. Here are some models that come to mind:

• The Read Only Model - Simply look at the dashboard with no expectations of interaction with it. The dashboard serves to communicate snapshot information. Call the IT department to create new reports.
• The Enterprise Reporting Model - Users can peruse canned reports, but also run ad-hoc queries and save them as future reports.
• The What-if Model - AKA the Excel Model - Give me full access to manipulate the data. Spreadsheets are the modeling tools that run the business world. Give me the ability to create new cubes of data so that I can explore new scenarios.
• The Community Model - Infuse the previous models with the power of the collective brain. Leverage the work of your colleagues. Don’t waste time working up things from scratch. Allow great content to surface. Mark reports and dashboard portlets as favorites and share them across the enterprise.
• The Unified Model - the nirvana of the enterprise. Imagine a portal that contains all the tools and access you need to take care of your responsibilities. Collaboration, communication, business process workflows - all combined to power your workspace. As you complete your work tasks, you are informed by graphical representations of business conditions and all the relevant attributes of the tasks at hand. You can also monitor the results of previous business adjustments and tweak them further. Now, that’s a dashboard!

What do you think?

The Dashboard Spy

Tags: User Interaction Models for Business Dashboards, UI, User Interface, Dashboards, The future of business intelligence, Dashboard UI, Dashboard User Interactions

What good is all the hard work you put into envisioning, implementing and rolling out a business system if it’s not adopted by the intended user community? Or, let’s look at a more subtle problem - how do you even know whether users are actually adopting the new system? The folks at salesforce.com have put out a great paper on a framework to study and manage user adoption. It’s called Adoption Dashboards Data Sheet (Metrics) and it’s a brief but valuable read.

First, let’s take a look at what a salesforce.com sales metrics dashboard looks like:

The whole premise of the approach is to use the graphic-based nature of the dashboard to stimulate interest and, hence, adoption of the system as a whole.

Here are the metrics put forth by salesforce.com as useful when studying user adoption. Scroll down to view the KPIs.

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Business Intelligence Dashboards rely on visual indicators and graphics to quickly impart information. Nothing does this faster than a good icon. Literally, a simple dashboard icon graphic can take the place of several paragraphs of text. Even among data representation techniques, we find this true. A small sparkline can replace a whole graph of trend data.

Many Dashboard Spy readers have asked me to point them to icon sets that work well for business dashboards. I’m happy to finally reveal several incredible collections of no cost, no restriction icons great for business intelligence application use.

Start with the silk icon set at famfamfam.  Here is a screengrab of a small part of the collection. Note the red/green/yellow icons. In this case, they are represented by flags. Also, you may find useful the user icons and the color tag labels.

FamFamFam also offers for free the Mini Icons Collection. You may find some good dashboarding icons in that set, particularly if you need small icons.

Hope you like these icon sets. Hey, their small, impactful, and free. What’s not to like? Try them on your business intelligence dashboard.

Tags: Dashboard Icons, Red/Green/Yellow Icons for Dashboards, Dashboard icon sets, Digital Dashboard Design

Massive systems produce massive amounts of metrics. The challenge of business intelligence is to figure out how to slice and present the data in ways that benefit the user rather than confuse them. We’ve all seen situations where users get inundated with out-of-context numbers that do worse than confuse - they mislead and alarm.

The answer lies in information architecture, of course. Categorization of the information must be done from the user’s point of view.

New York City has gone out of its way to organize the performance metrics available to track the performance of its many agencies. The city has organized its KPIs by what they call “themes”. A great idea. Here is the diagram they display to people interested in NYC citywide performance metrics. They ask you to indicate a theme, or area of interest as follows:

Nothing to it, you say. “It’s obvious”. Well, if it were obvious, why do we still see those dropdowns with hundreds of values to choose from?

By using navigation to split users and find out their intentions, we can limit field choices to a reasonable level once they get to the data request form page.

Here is the link to the New York City Citywide Performance Reporting application.

The Google Sites platform is now available and all of the business dashboard community should immediately explore this new option for BI dashboarding. At least for quick mockups and prototypes, although you’ll find them quite suitable for standalone business dashboard applications. The Google Sites Dashboard is part of the Google Apps offerring. That means it is available at no cost. Dashboard Spy readers - did you hear that? A free, powerful dashboarding tool from Google is now available.

Think of Google Sites as an instant collaboration and community platform. It’s very Sharepoint in it’s functionality and approach. Check out Google Apps and open an account through this link:

Now, let’s look at the functionality and screen templates available from Google Sites. Here are some screenshots of various layouts including the dashboard page type. Remember, the idea is collaboration so think wikis, blogs, sharepoint, etc.

Tags: Google Sites Dashboard

Business intelligence vendors must be counting time in dog-years because things are happening awfully fast in this space. As we predicted here at The Dashboard Spy, 2007 saw some industry-shaking acquisitions by the major BI dashboarding players. This resulted in Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM moving from owning collectively less than 25% of the market to now controlling over 65% of the space.

Let’s take a look at the famous Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence for both January 2008 and January 2007 to see how the BI dashboard space has mutated so quickly. Excuse the scribbling I did on the Magic Quadrant diagram. The January 2008 cutoff date meant that the diagram does not show the SAP/Business Objects acquisition. Go to the Dashboards by Example post here to see an original 2008 BI Magic Quadrant chart.

Between January of 2007 and Feb of 2008, we saw the following consolidations through acquisitions by large BI players:

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