I’m happy to oblige the reader who asked me to dig out the Fire Chief Field Command Dashboard:

Take a look at http://www.superiortrademark.com/amer/dashboard.htm for a real-life, physical command board. As the page states:

“Incident Command is a complicated business. As Incident Commander you are trying to coordinate many activities in rapid succession. Many of the leading Chiefs in the Country are not in favor of using the back of the Chief’s car as the Command Center because you are surrounded by the noise and confusion of the scene and because of the distractions of weather. The Dashboard Commander™ was designed with this in mind. Many Chiefs prefer to run an incident from the front of the Chief’s car where they have all of their radios available and where they can provide themselves with a secure quiet environment. Most command boards cannot be used in the front of the car, but this was designed specifically for this purpose. The dry erase surface has space for size-up notes, strategic planning, assignments, PAR, hazards and a sketch of the scene. A stopwatch clock tracks time. Included are 38 custom engraved magnetic pieces representing your apparatus and officers. You place these magnets on the board to track the assignments of your teams.”

Excel Dashboard

Topic: Finding Excel Dashboard Examples to Study

A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me to ask how to best go about learning how to use Microsoft Excel for dashboarding. Seems that she got assigned to a departmental dashboard team that was tasked to come up with some KPIs and dashboards.

The requirements seemed straight-forward: decide on the best metrics to display, collect them on a weekly basis, and display them on an excel dashboard.

I advised this budding Dashboard Spy to study some example excel dashboards. She asked me if I could send her some xls files. I told her I would do better than that – I would show her how I use google to find example excel dashboards to learn from.

I ran a quick query and came across this simple auction management excel dashboard:

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All Dashboard Spy readers are urged to download the new business intelligence white paper from Information Builders titled “Five Things You Need to Know About Your Users Before You Deploy Business Intelligence”.

This excellent whitepaper lists 5 things you need to know before you begin planning your BI application, so you can better understand the blend of capabilities needed to address end user requirements. Click here for the whitepaper: 5 Things You Need to Know About Your Users Before You Deploy Business Intelligence.

In this white paper, you will learn five key things, as well as their implications you need to know about your users. Additionally, this white paper will recommend effective ways to answer questions pertaining to your planned business intelligence environment. Those answers will help you determine the most appropriate form of deployment, so you can ensure widespread adoption and maximum user satisfaction.

Here is a preview of the 5 things they talk about:

Below is the list of the 5 things you need to know before you begin planning your application, so
you can better understand the blend of capabilities needed to address end user requirements.

1. What is the technical skill level and sophistication of the user(s)?

2. How much time can they spend finding, accessing, and analyzing information?

3. What types of questions will they be asking? [Note: the answer to this question will require
in-depth investigation, since it differs greatly from “What kind of information do you need?”

4. How often are the users traveling (or how often are they in the office)?

5. How timely must the data they are accessing be?

Correctly answering these five questions will provide you with a foundation for mapping out the
right mix of functionality necessary to meet user needs and optimize application utilization.

Five Things You Need to Know About Your Users Before You Deploy Business Intelligence

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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The recent post on Dashboards By Example on creating WebSphere Portal Dashboard Mashups using Google Gadgets triggered a few discussions on whether or not the public APIs (Google Maps, etc) consumed by mashup dashboards and applicaitons will really be embraced by Enterprise IT. The hesitation expressed concerned the lack of ownership and control of the data.

For those of you that didn’t see the post, I basically ran through some of the impact that Web 2.0 has had on enterprise dashboards. In particular, I discussed how the availability of APIs from Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc has allowed a surge of Dashboard Mashups – or dashboards that consume both data and behavior from many difference sources. Think of it as web services and SOA come true in its most user-centric way.

There was no doubt among the Dashboard Spy readership that the user experience will benefit, but some dashboarders with a traditional IT mindset seemed a little “scared” of the fact that their applications would be exposing both data and behavior that they did not own.

I point out the very informative InfoWorld article from July 28, 2006 called Enterprise Mashups: Web 2.0 Style Integration at the Browser Isn’t Just for Consumer Apps Anymore and Businesses Are Starting to Take Notice.

I took the liberty of “borrowing” a couple of key graphics from the article (Once a Dashboard Spy, always a Dashboard Spy, I suppose!).

First, let’s have a look at what they call “The beautiful simplicity of mashups”.

Here is a listing of what they identified as enterprise mashup best practices:

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Dashboard Example: Dashboard Metrics and KPIs. A simple but interesting approach to figuring out your core key performance indicators comes in the form of this kpi development checklist and sample Excel Dashboard Template from Stacey Barr.

It’s even got hints as to whether you should delegate each task or tackle it yourself.

Core KPI Checklist

1. Choose just one result that’s important to your business. [Don't delegate this.]
2. Decide the best way for you to measure that result, and how frequently. [Don't delegate this.]
3. Look for the data for that measure, or get it as easily as you can. Get as much history as you can, too, to have an instant time series. [Delegate this.]
4. Set up a routine to capture the data in a simple spreadsheet. [Delegate this.]
5. Set up a graph in the spreadsheet that automatically updates with new data as it’s added. [Delegate this.]
6. Review your measure for a few weeks, until you find a way to make it improve. [Don't delegate this.]
7. Go back to step 1, to choose another result.

Here is her Simple Excel Dashboard Template.

Over at the http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com blog, I cover the Michigan Government Performance Dashboard. It’s a fascinating project that even involved the Governor touting the business performance dashboard as part of the State of the State address.

What I thought I’d focus on here is an artifact from that government dashboard project that I stumbled upon online. It’s a sample dashboard that the Michigan Government Performance Dashboard team published as a recommended local government dashboard. Take a look at this screenshot:

Now take a look at how they used this for their own performance dashboard layout:

You can view the latest performance dashboard by visiting the Michigan Dashboard at http://www.michigan.gov/midashboard

Excellent thoughts here from Dashboard Spy reader, Terry Brown (Director of Marketing at Klipfolio.com). His article is particularly helpful for KPI dashboard builders.

Anatomy of a KPI: From Raw Number to Clarity

The use of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is an integral part of business intelligence. The careful definition and use of a KPI, enable a business or department to monitor its progress against these goals.

Let’s use a simple scenario to take a raw number and turn it into a KPI that is concise, clear and has meaning.

Consider the finance department within a company. One of the key objectives is to reduce the amount of outstanding invoices to increase cash flow.

The overall objective is refined to: Reduce outstanding payables over 30 days to less than $30k.

They wish to compare the current metric to the historical average to indicate movement; trending up, down or unchanged.

We now have a KPI that is not simply a number; we’ve added meaning and insight without adding complexity. Where the above KPI is mean for at-a-glance awareness, tooltips and hover-over states can provide additional context to the metric as seen in step 5.

This example highlights the key characteristics of a KPI: it is relevant and associated with a high-level goal for the company; it can be measured as a numeric value, one that provides context, from an operational system. It is tied to a group/departments activity; they are accountable to take action to keep the KPI within the identified thresholds.

Alternative visualizations of the above

There is significant research regarding which metrics matter to specific industries. However, it is important to understand that the performance indicators that are key for an individual organization cannot be dictated by an out-of-the-box solution. They vary depending on the industry, the functional area of the company, and the unique needs and focus of the organization. Contact us at Klipfolio.

There’s a new web/mobile version of Klipfolio Dashboard coming out. And you may be able to get in as a beta tester. This is important news in the business dashboard community so I’m going to repeat it and drop the link for you again.

And, yes, I’m proud to say that The Dashboard Spy was the first to leak news of the upcoming beta.

I caught wind of it and communicated with Allan Wille. While I’m not at liberty to give more concrete details, I can tell you that it there is a chance to get in on the public beta test of this new revolutionary dashboard product.

Go to this page and you’ll see some links to check out. I’ve signed up there hoping to get into the beta and I suggest you do the same.

http://www.klipfolio.com/kpi-dashboard/beta

Enuf said. This is going to be hot.

Hubert
The Dashboard Spy

From this post about a media convergence dashboard comes an interesting screenshot showing a fascinating use of an executive dashboard as part of an interactive television type of experience. Can enterprise dashboards replace TV? Take a look at this dashboard screenshot. Sorry for the small size – visit the source dashboarding blog directly for a much larger screenshot.

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