The Dashboard Spy

Dashboards have finally reached a critical mass as a distinct design pattern and method of conveying business intelligence. How do I know? When a Museum of Art prominently features its enterprise dashboard for its visitors, benefactors and board members to examine, it’s an indication that art directors believe it to be intuitive, cutting-edge and “of-the-times”.

Visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard to see this slickly designed executive dashboard.

Here’s my thinking. Who are a museum’s biggest patrons? Fortune 1000 companies and their executives and directors. When a museum has a function and the big-wigs are mingling and discussing their cool new dashboard, the CEO will really be in their element and tell everyone how his company has been using dashboards for a while now. He’ll go on about the dashboard projects that his business units and IT departments are working on. And the CEOs that haven’t started dashboard projects yet? Well, just wait until the next morning when they march over to the CIO’s office!

Take a look a this beautiful dashboard.

As you see, the museum dashboard is a collection of interesting metrics relevant to the various constituents of a museum.

There is a straight-forward use of screen regions (call them portlets, widgets, windows, etc) with a combination web statistics, museum visitor counts, collection information and even the museum’s daily average electrical consumption. All lavishly illustrated with big icons.

I like the footers that appear on each portlet. Interesting. They give some room to put some summary information. Too bad they just have the date there. How about a little sparkline to show trend information?

Have a visit and welcome to the mass adoption of the business intelligence dashboard. Be sure to try out the navigation tabs on the upper right of the screen. They work in a stylish Web 2.0 fashion that speaks to modern design sensibilities.

Tags: Museum Metrics Dashboard, Dashboards

Update: I found this comment by the Museum’s CIO about the Museum Dashboard over at Beth’s Blog: How Non Profits Can Use Social Media. Beth - hope aren’t mad about me hijacking the CIO’s comment:

Hi,

I’m the Chief Information Officer at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and am happy that you generally like what we’ve done to date with the Dashboard!

Just wanted to let you know some of our plans for moving the Dashboard forward since we’re certainly not finished quite yet

Each Dashboard node is updated by staff of the museum according to a different update frequency as it makes sense… (i.e. our horticulture folks generally keep track of their planting activities on a quarterly basis, so you’ll see the statistics related to planting changing only once every 3 or 4 months as we get new information)

We keep track and display the history of every node, so as we add new values and measurements, you’ll be able to see a history of previous values. As we get more historical information for each statistic, we’ve design the software to be able to generate graphs and charts eventually… we just havn’t been doing this long enough to have enough data.

We’d like to add more automation into some of these statistics where we can so that we can update them more frequently. This has proven to be more easy with our automated attendance than with other statistics. We also want to make sure that this information remains accurate, and so, want to encourage staff members to keep an eye on statistics they are responsible for.

We’re also planning on fleshing out the content in the more sections a bit more over time. Hopefully, this can offer a layer of context to why we care about certain stats and what we hope to achieve by measuring them.

In addition to being a tool by which the public can keep track of what’s going on here… we also plan to use this same information in tracking for ourselves our own performance over time!

If you have more questions or suggestions of things you’d like to see tracked… you can contact us at
web at imamuseum dot org