The Dashboard Spy

Business intelligence practitioners looking for examples of executive dashboards can go here:

Executive Dashboards Gallery

You’ll find executive dashboard templates, design best practices and examples of enterprise dashboards.

Dashboard Spy Topic: Environmental Dashboard.

Green information technology infrastructure projects have been receiving increasing focus as more companies come under regulatory pressure to reduce their carbon footprint. Microsoft has released a Environmental Sustainability Dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics AX that helps companies with the monitoring of energy costs, consumption metrics and greenhouse gas emissions.

This environmental dashboard centers on a customizable page titled “My Role Center,” which displays environmental information with metrics such as “Actual Energy Costs,” “KPI List,” “Greenhouse Gas Emissions” and an “Energy Consumption” chart.

Data can be entered into the system by hand, or taken from meters or purchase orders. For example, an accounts payable clerk can open a new tab for a utility company and input the substance being consumed (such as electricity or gas), the units and quantity, and the dates over which the substance is being used, and then that data will be tracked.

Here is a screen shot of the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard demo video. Click on that link to launch the video.

For more information on this business intelligence dashboard, see Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability Dashboard.

Update: This just in. There is a good article on Green IT called Software as a Service: The Secret Weapon for Profits and the Planet. It’s an interesting article. Here is an excerpt:

Now, companies in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector are leading a charge to show how SaaS is the ultimate secret weapon for reducing any client company’s carbon footprint. Arguably, it has always been integral to the ethos of SaaS to be green. At the core of SaaS offerings of any stripe are greater operating efficiency , lower costs, and shared resources among clients; all solid sustainability practices. Now, to measure their green impact, SaaS companies are tracking the planetary benefit of their performance in terms of saving trees, jet fuel, or disk space and demonstrating through conversations and case studies how their clients shuffle less paper, travel less, or store and access data more efficiently.

Framing cost reduction as a green initiative may also be a win-win for companies, their employees, and the environment. According to Jhana Senxian, researcher at Aberdeen and co-author of the upcoming book Green IT for Dummies, “Sustainability builds employee loyalty.” Senxian explains, “Acoforategreen/sustainability initiative gets a lot more volunteers than a typical cost-reduction initiative where a company would get just a few volunteers.”

Tags: Green dashboard, microsoft environmental sustainability dashboard for dynamics ax, Green information technology

Note: Learn to create compelling Excel Dashboards at zero cost with these Excel Dashboard Templates.

The dashboard paradigm has been embraced literally by The New York Times. The following images show a media arts installation in the lobby of the New York Times building that turns two opposing walls into large information dashboards. Named “Movable Type”, this project consists of 560 screens suspended on wires in two identical facing arrays. Each wall consists of 7 rows and 40 columns of 4 1/2 inch by 8 1/2 inch screens.

The content of the dashboard constantly changes. A live feed from The New York Times provides snippets of text to the displays. Additional input comes from nytimes.com website visitor stats and comments as well as content from the newspaper’s archives.

Movable Type displays fragments of information on each display such as quotes, details, questions, numbers and geographic information.

Here is an explanation of the project by the artists. They even delve into the feeds from the New York Times that they parse and how they coordinate matching sound effects.

Tags: Large Dashboards, Physical Real-world dashboard, movable type, new york times dashboard

12 Enterprise BI Platforms have been evaluated as part of the latest Forrester Wave study: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms Q3 2008. (Thanks goes to the Dashboard Spies who posted the findings document.)

Based on their evaluation of 151 criteria, Forrester finds that IBM/Cognos and SAP/Business Objects maintain market leading positions while Oracle and SAS Institute move up into leadership spots in enterprise BI because of their product functionality, scalability and completeness of corporate/product vision and strategy.

Here’s a diagram with the results of the BI platform evaluation:

A look at the relative scoring of the BI platforms compared across various criteria:

Click on the read more to find out more about the study of these BI platforms:

Read the rest of this entry »

Dashboard Topic: Visualizing the Data behind the 2008 Olympic Medal Count.

Data visualizations from the New York Times are usually visually stunning and well thought out. This fine example is no exception. The animated nature of these flash-based dashboards and data visualization graphics allow for intuitive analysis, especially for understanding trends over long periods of time.

Visit the Olympics Medal Count Map or watch the Dashboard Spy video below.

The results of the 2008 summer games being held in Beijing, China are displayed along with their historical context. Sliders allow back and forth visualization of the trends. Note in particular the swell and sudden disappearance of the Soviet medals in the 80’s. An interesting time in political history noticeable from the data in an interesting manner.

What do you think of this data visualization?

Tags: 2008 Olympic Medal Count, Olympics Medal Map, Data Visualization, New York Times

While doing some research into flash charting components, I came across this interesting dashboard tutorial from anychart.com. The dashboard creation tutorial walks the reader through the following nine steps:

1. Choose the Data
2. Choose the Layout
3. Convert the Data
4. Convert the Layout
5. Put Data and Layout Together
6. Plan the Interactivity
7. Prepare the Data for the Interactive Dashboard
8. Implement the Interactive Dashboard
9. Launch the Interactive Dashboard

In addition to showing code examples, the tutorial offers these interesting dashboard wireframes:

Tags: Interactive Dashboard Graphs, 9 steps of dashboard creation, anycharts dashboard, interactive dashboard tutorial