The Dashboard Spy

Designing the look and feel of an executive dashboard, KPI scorecard or any other business intelligence interface can be quite the challenge for those dashboard implementors that do not have formal (or informal) graphic design training. The question for a dashboard design newbie is literally, “Where do I start?”. One common approach is to emulate the look of other business intelligence applications. I must tell you that one of the main reasons for the popularity of The Dashboard Spy and it’s companion collection of 1000 executive dashboards, is the use of the screenshots as graphical references. Using this approach, while it does give you a headstart, can have the negative impact of making your executive dashboard look like everyone else’s.

So how do you start? Well, maybe you can inspire your creativity by focusing first on the basic graphic design elements. Choose an element to think about first. Say, color, for example.

Here is a really nifty way to spur your creative thoughts on the meaning of colors. Take a look at this application at www.colorofmysound.com:

(more…)

Dashboard Spy readers have persuaded me to start publishing some of my “secret” pdf links. During discussions about key business intelligence topics such as BI vendor evaluations, reporting package reviews, and other subjects of interest to the IT Executive and Business User community, I often will give out links to very helpful, but also very-hard-to-find resources. These links tend to be for vendor landscape documents, product evaluations, technology landscape reviews and other such high-value deliverables.

While sold for very high prices by business and IT consulting groups, these business intelligence resources are then very often offered by the purchasing companies as free resources to their clients. The problem is finding the links to the assets. Of course, finding things is what The Dashboard Spy does best!  Enjoy these links: (more…)

Hospitals, medical centers and other health systems commonly use digital dashboard technology to assist in their performance monitoring and quality improvement processes. We have recently examined several hospital executive dashboards over at the dashboard screenshot collection (www.enterprise-dashboard.com).

Today we look at the metrics and KPIs commonly used to monitor performance as well an example of a performance improvement process:

  (more…)