The Dashboard Spy

Long time Dashboard Spy reader know of my fascination with future dashboard technology. What will the business intelligence dashboards of the future look like? I’ve said in the past that it would great if dashboard technology really did follow the vision shown in the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. Remember that floating user interface with the glove controls?

Ever since that movie, I suspected that Tom Cruise had a secret passion for business intelligence in general and enterprise dashboard design in particular. I am proud to announce that I’ve finally proven his involvement with business dashboards. No, The Dashboard Spy’s secret identity is NOT Tom Cruise (I won’t go that far!). But I now have a connection between Tom Cruise and an implemented, publicly-available dashboard.  

Follow me on this. First, here are a couple of reminders of the executive dashboard with the gloved interface used by Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report. See the dashboard with the virtual display?

And here is a close up of the glove controls:

Anyway, so those are some shots of the enterprise dashboard from the Minority Report movie.

Here is where things get interesting:

Fast forward a couple of years to the movie Mission Impossible 3, starring, of course, Tom Cruise.  In that spy thriller (get it, “Spy” as in Dashboard Spy?), Tom plays an agent whose cover identity is an individual who works as an analyst for the Virginia Department of Transportation.

I have some screenshots from the movie to show you a couple of things.

Here is the scene where Tom is on the run from the corrupt section leader. He hids in some duct work and pops up into a VDOT office. Note the pamphlets that he scatters on the floor.

Here is a closeup of the VDOT material. Does it seem familiar to you? Maybe from a previous Dashboard Spy post?

Does the VDOT ring a bell? Take a look at this post on an enterprise dashboard from the Virginia Department of Transportation?  Here is a screenshot of the highway traffic dashboard:

How funny is that? Tom Cruise, user of the famous future dashboard in Minority Report, works in the movie Mission Impossible 3 as a traffic analyst in the office of the Virginia Department of Transportation, implementor of a well-known, publicly-accessible enterprise dashboard.

Now, don’t you believe that this coincidence is somewhat bizarre? Is this Six Degrees of Dashboarding, or what?

PS. No, the Dashboard Spy has not lost his mind. This was all in good fun. I don’t really know if Tom Cruise is a business intelligence dashboard expert or not, but this little diversion did provide a bit of comic relief to my team during some tense KPI selection debates for our current executive dashboard project.

Tags: Dashboard of the Future, Tom Cruise Dashboard, Minority Report Dashboards, Virginia Department of Transportation Dashboard, VDOT Dashboards, Six Degrees of Dashboarding