Executive Dashboard Topic: Measuring Brand Strength and Marketing Metrics with Dashboards
An executive dashboard can be a powerful force multiplier, especially when it comes to areas that, while traditionally reliant on trend analysis and data crunching, have not jumped on the idea of enterprise dashboards as quickly as other parts of the organization. Such is the case in the area of marketing, particularly brand management. (more…)
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. (more…)
Dashboard Update: We’ve heard from the designer of this dashboard. Thank you for the contribution. I apologize for being harsh about the design of the dashboard. Nice explanation you sent in.
Hi,
I am actually the developer of the bed board shown. Although at first glance it looks a bit intimidating, after 10 minutes of explanation, most units/nurses never have problems using it.
The thumbs up/down on a green cell, indicate whether the bed can be used (even though it’s available)- hovering above the cell will show the reason in a tooltip (for instance, not staffed for, or private room, bed broken, etc). The cell is green because the bed IS available, but there may be a reason it cannot be used, so a thumbs down is used with a reason displayed on hover. This is handy because it can be used for things like acuity, etc.
Although housewide data is shown, a single unit, only needs to concern themselves with a single column. For instance, 5 TOW, has their own column (it’s actually 2 columns for bed 1, bed 2)…so for the units, they only look at their columns. You can see the units listed across the top.
The symbols are pretty easy - I’s are isolation, D’s are direct admission, T’s are Transfers, the eyeball symbol is “under observation”…yellow cells are waiting for housekeeping (to be cleaned)…
After much research in the bed board area, this was a much more simple, and cost effective solution to develop in-house, than to purchase one. We have the advantage of tweaking the system to our specific needs.
The screen shot you see, is about its 10th evolution, after many “staff-suggested” features were built in.
If you have any questions about it, please don’t hesitate to email me 
Thanks-
David Stoltz
Programming Manager
Sacred Heart Hospital
We’ve seen a couple of different dashboards dedicated to patient management in hospitals. They basically all show the same thing: available beds and occupied beds with the data sliced by hospital care unit. Pretty straight-forward, usually. A Dashboard Spy sent me this screenshot of the “Bed Board” used at Sacred Heart Hospital in Allentown, PA.
My head is spinning trying to figure this enterprise dashboard out. I don’t have the legend to help me, so I’m obviously at a disadvantage. However, a common enterprise dashboard design best practice is (more…)
A Dashboard Spy located in an AS/400 shop sent me some of his notes regarding his research for a portal project. Seems that they are looking to integrate some executive dashboards into their intranet. He looked into a portal product specifically for the AS 400 and forwarded me some dashboard screenshots.
These dashboards show an inventory example. You can see that the sales and inventory data are shown both in tabular form as well as through graphics.
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This real time enterprise dashboard is used by a corporation’s technical communications team. The unit is responsible for managing cellular phone use and other such communication technologies. Their dashboard allows management to monitor the progress of projects such as cell phone switchovers and software patches. The metrics are gathered and displayed in real time.
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Enterprise dashboards are great for tracking sales metrics. This example shows how a radio station tracks the sales performance of their sales team. To protect the Dashboard Spy who “liberated” this executive dashboard, we’ve deleted the name of the radio station, but we can tell you that it’s a smaller station with a real niche focus. We have left in the sales figures, so this example is interesting. This dashboard is divided into various portlets that display different metrics.
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