Who Invented the Business Dashboard?
Enterprise Dashboard Topic: Does anyone know who invented the digital dashboard?
Believe it or not, I meet a lot of people who claim to be the first to have done something in the dashboarding space.
It’s actually not such a wild claim.
Dashboard Spy readers know that this forum is dedicated to learning from the work of others. It is by studying, borrowing and extending prior examples of dashboards, scorecards and other business intelligence interfaces, that we advance the body of knowledge known as dashboarding, business intelligence or information visualization.
As someone who sits squarely in the “information wants to be free” camp, and an avid “borrower” of “OPD” - Other People’s Dashboards, it disturbs me when I hear people talking too seriously about how they own the rights to certain business intelligence delivery patterns.
Yes, I do understand the right to make money from proprietary systems. But I do think that this is a particularly murky area in that it is certainly not clear who came up with what first. As an avid collector (some say it’s a fetish) of dashboard examples, I can point to examples of dashboard functionality that clearly establish date claims.
This all came up during a conversation with a Dashboard Spy reader that claimed to have invented some dashboard presentation technologies way back in the day. We spoke at length - speculating who invented the first dashboard, digital or otherwise. Our conversation eventually led to a joint examination of an online patent database. It let’s you research patent filings at no charge. It’s an interesting exercise to search patents relating to business intelligence and dashboards.
Here is a sample results list. I’ve circled one that I looked at in detail:
The one I circled was filed by none other than Microsoft. Here’s a look at the details:
The abstract for the patent is as follows:
An interactive dashboard providing scorecard presentation with subordinate reports is automatically generated and configured based on centrally managed metadata definitions. The dashboard may be customized based on subscriber credentials, past preferences, and the like. The dashboard may be deployed to one or more locations to be consumed and further customized by end users.
Holy smokes! If that’s all that it takes to claim a patent on a dashboard, then we all should file our patents right this second. The shocking part of this particular patent is that the filing date is 2006! Don’t tell me that dashboards with the technology in question (see the filing itself for the details at this link) didn’t appear before that date.
Just for kicks, here is an example of a pretty early dashboard:
Tags: Business Dashboard Patents
