The Dashboard Spy

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

Today’s Xcelsius Dashboard Example features a benchmarking approach to medical practice performance management. This web-based xcelsius dashboard allows healthcare practices to enter values related to their physician compensation and production metrics. After selecting the medical specialty and entering the KPI information, the dashboard displays the practice’s ranking as compared to industry benchmarks.

Take a look at this dashboard screenshot. Visit the actual dashboard: Physician Compensation and Production Dashboard. The dashboard is a free web offerring from MGMA - Medical Group Management Association.

Here is a Dashboard Spy video of the doctor compensation dashboard in action:

Interested in the metrics contained in this healthcare dashboard? Click the Read more link:

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It’s a simple question - Can your business user take managerial action based on your dashboard? Of course, you say “yes” without hesitation, but let’s slow down and examine what makes a business dashboard truly actionable.

Analytics guru and dashboard afficionado, Avinash Kaushik, author of the excellent book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day had a recent blog posting titled The Action Dashboard: An Alternative to Crappy Dashboards.

Avinash comments that most dashboards are, well, crappy. And the reason why is that they are “data pukes that provide little in terms of context and even less in terms of actionable value”.

What makes a “data puke”?

He shows the following screen as an example:

Looking at this dashboard example, one may be tempted to think that we call this particular dashboard a “data puke” because of its content - i.e. lots of data heavy, text-based portlets.

However, Avinash makes the excellent point that slick, eye-candy type dashboards can also be data pukes. It’s not just text-heavy presentations that make for data pukes.

I wanted to point the above out purely because of a common feature of 80% of Web Analytics Dashboards, in excel with a billion tabs to look through. This is not a dashboard, it is the result of a massive sum of money paid to a Consultant who is trying to impress you with his / her excel skills - without actually telling you anything.

Avinash goes on to say why he thinks most business dashboards “stink”:

Why is this so? All the above efforts are well intentioned, took lots of honest work and probably took months to put together. So why?

Here are some hidden (corrosive) reasons why most dashboards tend to stink when it comes to helping the Executive make any decisions:

They leave the interpretation to the Executive (/ customer / requestor / other Squirrels). This is a fatal flaw because most dashboards are highly aggregated views of any KPI and are missing all the nuance and analysis (that only you as Ms. Ninja have, and you don’t go with dashboard).

Most Executives actually want insights / action recommendations but they don’t trust the Squirrels / Ninjas / VP’s / Data Providers. So they ask for numbers. We dutifully cram as many of them on to a A4 size paper in 3 size font and send it along with a magnifying glass.

Most Squirrels / Ninjas live in a silo. Going out to collect enough tribal knowledge to actually know what is going on to then make recommendations from the data is not something that we do, nor are we encouraged by our Executives or our organization structures. This incentivizes data pukeing.

Often dashboard creators tend to be “outsiders” (Consultants, Experts etc) and they often don’t have deep practitioner experience that would allow them to understand the human / “below the surface” issues like the above three. That leads non-Practitioners to make the common mistakes like creating the above dashboards.

So does Avinash provide real advice as to how to avoid data pukes and create actionable dashboards? He sure does.

If you are on the front page of the Dashboard Spy blog, you may have to click on the following “Read More” link to see Avinash’s advice for “Action Dashboards”.

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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