The Dashboard Spy

Do you know what dashboard holds the distinction of being the world’s first enterprise dashboard? The answer came up during a Salesforce.com presentation. They taped this video (see embedded video on how to create a top sales dashboard) on the types of performance indicators that should go on a sales dashboard. It’s a rather long video, and there’s really not much to see. I treated it like a podcast and just listened to the audio feed while I worked on some dashboard design issues.

Anyway, getting back to the topic of the first use of a computer to generate a business dashboard, the video starts with the presenter talking about how dashboards have been around for a very long time. He points out the tale of the world’s first business computer and it’s first output - a business dashboard.

The distinction of the first enterprise dashboard goes to the Lyons Tea and Cake Shop, who in the 1940’s, ran an operation involving over 100 bakeries in the UK. They had the classic problem of trying to find out across their enterprise various financial metrics. They were interested in knowing the total and average payrolls and salaries of their workers and identify the highest and lowest cases.

Lyons hired a Cambridge graduate who had heard of the computers being developed in the US (where the emphasis was on the scientific use of computing) and realized that such computational power can be helpful in business uses. After creating a large room-sized apparatus of over 3000 tubes and who knows how many thousands of feet of cabling, the computer called LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) was born. It was the first business computer. The first task of the computer was to print out the business dashboard that showed the payroll metrics. The first metric as average salaries and variances at the various cake shops.

The company’s pursuit of the first business computer is detailed in the book, A Computer Called Leo: Lyons Tea Shops and the World’s First Office Computer. If you’d like to read a review, click on this picture of the cover:

Here is the video.

The first speaker had a good list of questions to ask when starting a sales dashboard project:

• Who is the consumer of the dashboard?
• What do they need to see?
• What is the business question they are trying to answer?
• What business metrics must come from the dashboard?
• What kind of chart graphic does the desired information take? Pie chart? Bar chart?
• Where does the information come from? Leads, pipeline, financials?
• What further questions will be asked? What comes next in the drilldowns?
• How will the user want to do to effect the numbers seen?
• What navigation options make sense from the dashboard view?

Update: See the first PC-based business dashboard: The First Spreadsheet Dashboard Report