Visit the digital dashboard from the Wall Street Journal Digital Network and you’ll see how it makes use of hover over events to surface data in a very easy-to-use manner. By simply hovering over a section of the dashboard or the red/green indicators on the right, we get a “fly-out” kind of effect with corresponding data.

You can get some indication of the effect in this dashboard screenshot, but you’ll have to visit the dashboard yourself to really get how the navigation works. Take a look at this image and I’ll drop the link below it.

To visit this digital dashboard, click on this link: WSJ Digital Dashboard

Today’s Business Intelligence Dashboard subject: Balanced Scorecards

Balanced Scorecards are excellent performance communication tools that consolidate executive performance reporting into shared windows for all view the company’s metrics.

Take a look at this screen shot and you’ll see that balanced scorecards use the typical red/yellow/green coding.

This screen comes from a helpful, self-paced intro to balanced scorecards. To download and view the powerpoint presentation, use this link:

Balanced Scorecard Introduction

Here’s a little taste of the intro:

An Executive Cockpit: Balanced ScoreCards are company-wide performance measurement systems that focus your company on carefully chosen strategic themes. ScoreCards track strategic initiatives as well as operational results in a balanced set of metrics, reported on a Dashboard. Each metric has a “drill down slide” that tells you where you’ve been and are now, compared to your targets. Leading indicators provide “early warning” of where the company is headed – early enough to affect results this quarter. Rather than each Executive having sole access to his/her own data, ScoreCards give the Executive Team a shared window into all corners of the business.

A Tool for Company Focus: ScoreCards are tremendous communication tools, focusing the entire company on executives’ top priorities. Used regularly at middle management, and even “all hands” meetings, ScoreCards keep the entire company aligned on strategy, and prevent any gap between lower echelon and executive priorities.

This “RealTime” Demo: What you are about to see is a composite of best practices from ScoreCards developed for a variety of companies. To protect confidentiality in this demo, we’ve created a fictitious company, called “RealTime”. While the data is fictitious, the metrics and charts are real.

When you think dashboard graphics and dashboarding metrics, the ubiquitous pie chart graph probably comes to mind first. It must be the most widely used chart in the business world. Every school child is taught to read on and every business powerpoint has one in it.

The recent issue of Stephen Few’s Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter features a lead article on this classic business graphic. The article is comprehensive – I would consider it the definitive treatise on the pie chart. It covers the interesting history of the chart and most importantly, it offers many good reasons why you should NOT use this common graph form.

Few first starts off with the history of the little pie chart. Take a look at this first known usage of the pie chart:

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Quick, take a look at this dashboard heatmap done in Excel and tell me if it’s a good or bad use of color:

OK, it’s a pretty nifty excel heatmap, right? Ready for the answer?

According to information visualization and business dashboard expert Stephen Few:

In this example, traffic light colors of green, yellow and red are being used to encode high profits (green), low profits or losses (yellow), and high losses (red) across several product types and states. It is probably true that the values that are of greatest concern to the person viewing them are those in dark red and dark green, but they are the hardest values to read, because there is not enough contrast between black text and dark background colors for the numbers to stand out.

He’s talking about one of his rules about using colors:

If you want objects in a table or graph to be easily seen, use a background color that contrasts sufficiently with the object.

“The above rule cautions us to choose colors carefully, always making sure that they are easy to see and that they effectively serve the purpose for which we are using them. I’ll illustrate this point using a display that is becoming increasingly familiar, but is seldom done well. With Microsoft Excel and several other software products, you can display quantitative data in the form of a heatmap. A heatmap is a visual display that encodes quantitative values as color. We are all familiar with weather maps, which use colors to represent varying amounts of rainfall or degrees of temperature. Heatmaps need not be arranged geographically; they can also be structured as a matrix of cells, such as a tabular arrangement of values in a spreadsheet.”

Check out Stephen’s full analysis in his PDF titled Rules for Using Color.

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 Wall Street Journal created an interactive graphics dashboard to track the NCAA tournament. it’s still up and operational and I urge you to take a look. You’ll see that the NCAA dashboard, composed mostly of text, features the latest Wall Street Journal headlines on the left panel and tweets on the right side. Load the page and let it run and you’ll see that this updates in live time.

Take a look at the screenshot and I’ll provide the link to the live example below.

To view the live NCAA Twitter Dashboard example, use this link:

Wall Street Journal NCAA Dashboard

Of interest, in this dashboard, on the different navigation devices used. At the top, we start off with two major tabs one for the interactive graphics and one for the comments. Lower down, we have several areas of navigation. The top left horizontal navigation lets you flip between the live blog and the headlines. On the right side, we have further game specific navigation. Note the use of the triangle indicator which is a nice web 2.0 / social media convention used to highlight the right side panel.

I also like how this is a usable application. Note the lower right side contains an actual tweeting area which you can use to share your thoughts. One excellent usage there is that the input box is preloaded with the hash tag for the event.

This is an excellent use of the dashboard layout and a good example of how text content can be all you need on a dashboard. Note however that text is not the only element. You can navigate to live video feeds as well as statistics.

This is a good example of the high quality graphics that the Wall Street Journal puts into their interactive dashboards. An excellent example of using flash technology to enliven data.

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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Business Dashboard Topic: Facility Management Dashboards

While advising a facilities management subject matter expert, I came across a treasure trove of business intelligence dashboard presentations, white papers and other resources targeted specifically towards Facility Management professionals.

Dig right into these links:

White paper: Are Facility Professionals Using Dashboards?

[In the Facility Management community, the value add of Dashboards are just beginning to be
realized. If your organization collects data (and we know facilities departments typically collect a
lot of information) then funneling that data into a clear and concise Dashboard format can create
an effective tool for communicating business objectives to senior management. Dashboards often
speak the language of senior management; FMs who adopt these tools may be more effective in
communicating with senior management...]

And here is a deck for presenting business dashboard fundamentals to Facilities Management professionals interested in better KPI presentation:

Dashboards 101 for Facilities Management

And here are some examples of facility mgmt dashboards:

Parks Dept Facilities Management Dashboard

Pharmaceutical Facility Management 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:

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What is Data Visualization?

Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the definition can vary depending on one’s individual focus.

The Dashboard Spy blog brings us this smorgasbord of data visualization resources.

Here’s a couple of really excellent data visualization blogs:

http://blogstats.wordpress.com

http://eagereyes.org

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7073131.stm

http://www.infosthetics.com

Check the http://dashboardspy.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/data-visualization-references blog post for more.