A dashboard spy reader pinged me last week for an example of a map driven enterprise dashboard. His business unit was considering integration of a GIS system into their dashboard reporting system And wanted some examples of current map driven dashboards that he could examine in a hands-on manner. He wanted an introduction dashboard, and not some lame demo. He just wrote me thanking me for the resource I pointed him to and I wanted to share it with you.

Take a look at the approach that the US federal government took with their Recovery.gov dashboard. Significant portions of it are strongly integrated with maps and allows the user to drill down all the way to the street and address level as well as flip between funding, aerial and street map views.

You will definitely want to try out this dashboard for yourself. Use this link:

http://www.recovery.gov

Take a look at this next screenshot and you’ll see that the recovery.gov homepage is itself a dashboard. It’s not apparent when you go there as they have a slick looking graphic at the top but scroll down on the page and you’ll see that there is a very nicely designed business dashboard layout in use.

This dashboard is a major tool in the federal government’s watchdog program that encourages transparency in government spending. While the data has been questioned as of late, it’s still an extraordinary use of technology to keep taxpayers in the loop as to how their money is spent. I encourage all business dashboard project team members and dashboard users to take a look at this dashboard example.

Want to play a game with The Dashboard Spy and Information Visualization expert Stephen Few? In his blog post, The Billion Pound-o-Gram Redesigned, he takes a stab at redesigning a pretty well known chart by David McCandless.

Take a look at the original chart here:

Here is how it appeared in Guardian.co.uk’s Information is Beautiful Friday:

The Billion Pound-o-Gram

289 billion spent on this. 400 billion spent on that. When money reaches this level it literally becomes mind- boggling.

Yet these figures are regularly issued by the government – and the media – as if they are self-evident facts that everyone understands.

Frustrated by this, I created The Billion Pound-O-Gram. It’s a cousin of the Billion Dollar-O-Gram.

In this version, I’ve mixed up of 2008/09 figures from the Treasury and the Guardian. Visualising the numbers like this puts them in visual context, making them easier to relate to.

I was pretty shocked by the size of the UK budget deficit – essentially the country’s overdraft. It’s more than an entire year’s worth of income tax.

So, now for the game. Stephen Few has redesigned the graph. Take a look at his version:

Here is what he had to say:

All of these comparisons are incredibly simple to make using the bar graph below. Take a minute to notice how easy it is to see the relationships between these values from largest to smallest and to compare them. Notice especially how easy it is to compare each of the values with the budget deficit, which appears as the vertical black reference line.

In the bar graph, I stuck with the colors that McCandless chose to make it easy to compare his chart with mine, except that I tweaked a few colors a bit to resolve minor problems. In McCandless’ chart, some colors stand out more than others, but they should be equal in salience unless there’s a reason to feature some items over others. Also, for some unknown reason McCandless sometimes altered a single color from rectangle to rectangle, which serves no purposes and creates potential confusion. For example, notice that some of the green rectangles are lighter than others, yet they all represent “Earning.”

I can’t imagine anyone seriously arguing that McCandless’ chart communicates this information as well as the alternative above, but is his chart more engaging? Some folks might find it more engaging purely on the level of entertainment, but not in a way that encourages or supports meaningful consideration of the information, resulting in optimal understanding. Journalism should tell the story truthfully and clearly.

So, which version do you like and why?

Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy

Today’s Xcelsius Dashboard Example features a benchmarking approach to medical practice performance management. This web-based xcelsius dashboard allows healthcare practices to enter values related to their physician compensation and production metrics. After selecting the medical specialty and entering the KPI information, the dashboard displays the practice’s ranking as compared to industry benchmarks.

Take a look at this dashboard screenshot. Visit the actual dashboard: Physician Compensation and Production Dashboard. The dashboard is a free web offerring from MGMA – Medical Group Management Association.

Here is a Dashboard Spy video of the doctor compensation dashboard in action:

Interested in the metrics contained in this healthcare dashboard? Click the Read more link:

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Dashboard Spy readers will need to get out their magnifying glasses out for this chart example. Talk about a complicated flow chart!

Based on the classic flow diagram style of charting, we have entities (with different shapes indicating state) of different types and various styles of connecting lines.

Here’s the link to the original. It’s at the U.S. senate site:

New Health Care System Diagram

And here’s a preview screenshot.

Oh, and, before you ask, No, it’s NOT a joke. Your tax dollars at work!

A Dashboard Spy reader wrote me asking about social media dashboards.

I sent him to check out this post titled:
Top 10 Social Media Dashboards

Here’s an excerpt:

One of the things we often hear from nonprofits and social enterprises is: How do I manage the torrent of social media conversations coming at me?

The answer used to be: Painstakingly and one conversation at a time. But a new crop of social media tools aims to tamp down the social media gusher by letting you update, monitor, manage and maintain several communication outlets at once. (While it’s sometimes hard to know what counts as a social media dashboard, we’re not including a wide range of customer relationship management (CRM) or social media monitoring tools here.)

When selecting a dashboard for personal or professional use, you should consider such items as cost, analytics and which social networks they support, among other things. Our list is meant to feature some of the breakout social media dashboards in the space and highlight their distinguishing features to make the selection process a bit easier.

Here are 10 of our favorite social media dashboard tools:

Visit the digital dashboard from the Wall Street Journal Digital Network and you’ll see how it makes use of hover over events to surface data in a very easy-to-use manner. By simply hovering over a section of the dashboard or the red/green indicators on the right, we get a “fly-out” kind of effect with corresponding data.

You can get some indication of the effect in this dashboard screenshot, but you’ll have to visit the dashboard yourself to really get how the navigation works. Take a look at this image and I’ll drop the link below it.

To visit this digital dashboard, click on this link: WSJ Digital Dashboard

Today’s Business Intelligence Dashboard subject: Balanced Scorecards

Balanced Scorecards are excellent performance communication tools that consolidate executive performance reporting into shared windows for all view the company’s metrics.

Take a look at this screen shot and you’ll see that balanced scorecards use the typical red/yellow/green coding.

This screen comes from a helpful, self-paced intro to balanced scorecards. To download and view the powerpoint presentation, use this link:

Balanced Scorecard Introduction

Here’s a little taste of the intro:

An Executive Cockpit: Balanced ScoreCards are company-wide performance measurement systems that focus your company on carefully chosen strategic themes. ScoreCards track strategic initiatives as well as operational results in a balanced set of metrics, reported on a Dashboard. Each metric has a “drill down slide” that tells you where you’ve been and are now, compared to your targets. Leading indicators provide “early warning” of where the company is headed – early enough to affect results this quarter. Rather than each Executive having sole access to his/her own data, ScoreCards give the Executive Team a shared window into all corners of the business.

A Tool for Company Focus: ScoreCards are tremendous communication tools, focusing the entire company on executives’ top priorities. Used regularly at middle management, and even “all hands” meetings, ScoreCards keep the entire company aligned on strategy, and prevent any gap between lower echelon and executive priorities.

This “RealTime” Demo: What you are about to see is a composite of best practices from ScoreCards developed for a variety of companies. To protect confidentiality in this demo, we’ve created a fictitious company, called “RealTime”. While the data is fictitious, the metrics and charts are real.

When you think dashboard graphics and dashboarding metrics, the ubiquitous pie chart graph probably comes to mind first. It must be the most widely used chart in the business world. Every school child is taught to read on and every business powerpoint has one in it.

The recent issue of Stephen Few’s Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter features a lead article on this classic business graphic. The article is comprehensive – I would consider it the definitive treatise on the pie chart. It covers the interesting history of the chart and most importantly, it offers many good reasons why you should NOT use this common graph form.

Few first starts off with the history of the little pie chart. Take a look at this first known usage of the pie chart:

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Quick, take a look at this dashboard heatmap done in Excel and tell me if it’s a good or bad use of color:

OK, it’s a pretty nifty excel heatmap, right? Ready for the answer?

According to information visualization and business dashboard expert Stephen Few:

In this example, traffic light colors of green, yellow and red are being used to encode high profits (green), low profits or losses (yellow), and high losses (red) across several product types and states. It is probably true that the values that are of greatest concern to the person viewing them are those in dark red and dark green, but they are the hardest values to read, because there is not enough contrast between black text and dark background colors for the numbers to stand out.

He’s talking about one of his rules about using colors:

If you want objects in a table or graph to be easily seen, use a background color that contrasts sufficiently with the object.

“The above rule cautions us to choose colors carefully, always making sure that they are easy to see and that they effectively serve the purpose for which we are using them. I’ll illustrate this point using a display that is becoming increasingly familiar, but is seldom done well. With Microsoft Excel and several other software products, you can display quantitative data in the form of a heatmap. A heatmap is a visual display that encodes quantitative values as color. We are all familiar with weather maps, which use colors to represent varying amounts of rainfall or degrees of temperature. Heatmaps need not be arranged geographically; they can also be structured as a matrix of cells, such as a tabular arrangement of values in a spreadsheet.”

Check out Stephen’s full analysis in his PDF titled Rules for Using Color.

Dashboard Spy Topic: Environmental Dashboard.

Green information technology infrastructure projects have been receiving increasing focus as more companies come under regulatory pressure to reduce their carbon footprint. Microsoft has released a Environmental Sustainability Dashboard for Microsoft Dynamics AX that helps companies with the monitoring of energy costs, consumption metrics and greenhouse gas emissions.

This environmental dashboard centers on a customizable page titled “My Role Center,” which displays environmental information with metrics such as “Actual Energy Costs,” “KPI List,” “Greenhouse Gas Emissions” and an “Energy Consumption” chart.

Data can be entered into the system by hand, or taken from meters or purchase orders. For example, an accounts payable clerk can open a new tab for a utility company and input the substance being consumed (such as electricity or gas), the units and quantity, and the dates over which the substance is being used, and then that data will be tracked.

Here is a screen shot of the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard demo video. Click on that link to launch the video.

For more information on this business intelligence dashboard, see Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability Dashboard.

Update: This just in. There is a good article on Green IT called Software as a Service: The Secret Weapon for Profits and the Planet. It’s an interesting article. Here is an excerpt:

Now, companies in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector are leading a charge to show how SaaS is the ultimate secret weapon for reducing any client company’s carbon footprint. Arguably, it has always been integral to the ethos of SaaS to be green. At the core of SaaS offerings of any stripe are greater operating efficiency , lower costs, and shared resources among clients; all solid sustainability practices. Now, to measure their green impact, SaaS companies are tracking the planetary benefit of their performance in terms of saving trees, jet fuel, or disk space and demonstrating through conversations and case studies how their clients shuffle less paper, travel less, or store and access data more efficiently.

Framing cost reduction as a green initiative may also be a win-win for companies, their employees, and the environment. According to Jhana Senxian, researcher at Aberdeen and co-author of the upcoming book Green IT for Dummies, “Sustainability builds employee loyalty.” Senxian explains, “Acoforategreen/sustainability initiative gets a lot more volunteers than a typical cost-reduction initiative where a company would get just a few volunteers.”

Tags: Green dashboard, microsoft environmental sustainability dashboard for dynamics ax, Green information technology

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