The Dashboard Spy

Dashboard designers are making more and more use of RIA (Rich Internet Application) techniques especially in the area of data graphing.

Rich Internet Applications, as you know, are web applications with the UI functionality of traditional client applications (desktop). Of course, when it comes to dashboards and business intelligence software, this has come full circle. We all remember fondly the rich features of our Visual Basic front end applications. We had combo dropdowns, type-ahead field selection and other rich UI features that we had to give up in the rush to become web-enabled. HTML just couldn’t provide the “juice” and we had to scale back our user experience expectations. Now, with the advent of RIA technology such as AJAX, FLEX, FLASH. etc., we are getting back our rich interfaces while still being web based.

Let’s take a look at a Dundas dashboard that offers such interactivity in drilling down on data. This customer service dashboard has a graph in the lower right spot that offers interesting functionality.

Let’s first take a look at the dashboard and then we’ll show you the functionality of the chart.

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Effective metrics on sales performance are highly sought after by those of us trying to produce dashboards helpful to managing the sales cycle. Some metrics would be ideal, but are too costly to measure or just plain impossible to gather data for. Others are too artificially manipulated. We all know how crafty sales people are (oops, sorry! Some of my best friends are account execs…)

Here is a quick look at 4 elements of sales performance and the sales metrics that correlate to those categories.

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