The Wall Street Journal created an interactive graphics dashboard to track the NCAA tournament. it’s still up and operational and I urge you to take a look. You’ll see that the NCAA dashboard, composed mostly of text, features the latest Wall Street Journal headlines on the left panel and tweets on the right side. Load the page and let it run and you’ll see that this updates in live time.
Take a look at the screenshot and I’ll provide the link to the live example below.
To view the live NCAA Twitter Dashboard example, use this link:
Wall Street Journal NCAA Dashboard
Of interest, in this dashboard, on the different navigation devices used. At the top, we start off with two major tabs one for the interactive graphics and one for the comments. Lower down, we have several areas of navigation. The top left horizontal navigation lets you flip between the live blog and the headlines. On the right side, we have further game specific navigation. Note the use of the triangle indicator which is a nice web 2.0 / social media convention used to highlight the right side panel.
I also like how this is a usable application. Note the lower right side contains an actual tweeting area which you can use to share your thoughts. One excellent usage there is that the input box is preloaded with the hash tag for the event.
This is an excellent use of the dashboard layout and a good example of how text content can be all you need on a dashboard. Note however that text is not the only element. You can navigate to live video feeds as well as statistics.
This is a good example of the high quality graphics that the Wall Street Journal puts into their interactive dashboards. An excellent example of using flash technology to enliven data.
It’s a simple question – Can your business user take managerial action based on your dashboard? Of course, you say “yes” without hesitation, but let’s slow down and examine what makes a business dashboard truly actionable.
Analytics guru and dashboard afficionado, Avinash Kaushik, author of the excellent book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
had a recent blog posting titled The Action Dashboard: An Alternative to Crappy Dashboards.
Avinash comments that most dashboards are, well, crappy. And the reason why is that they are “data pukes that provide little in terms of context and even less in terms of actionable value”.
What makes a “data puke”?
He shows the following screen as an example:
Looking at this dashboard example, one may be tempted to think that we call this particular dashboard a “data puke” because of its content – i.e. lots of data heavy, text-based portlets.
However, Avinash makes the excellent point that slick, eye-candy type dashboards can also be data pukes. It’s not just text-heavy presentations that make for data pukes.
I wanted to point the above out purely because of a common feature of 80% of Web Analytics Dashboards, in excel with a billion tabs to look through. This is not a dashboard, it is the result of a massive sum of money paid to a Consultant who is trying to impress you with his / her excel skills – without actually telling you anything.
Avinash goes on to say why he thinks most business dashboards “stink”:
Why is this so? All the above efforts are well intentioned, took lots of honest work and probably took months to put together. So why?
Here are some hidden (corrosive) reasons why most dashboards tend to stink when it comes to helping the Executive make any decisions:
They leave the interpretation to the Executive (/ customer / requestor / other Squirrels). This is a fatal flaw because most dashboards are highly aggregated views of any KPI and are missing all the nuance and analysis (that only you as Ms. Ninja have, and you don’t go with dashboard).
Most Executives actually want insights / action recommendations but they don’t trust the Squirrels / Ninjas / VP’s / Data Providers. So they ask for numbers. We dutifully cram as many of them on to a A4 size paper in 3 size font and send it along with a magnifying glass.
Most Squirrels / Ninjas live in a silo. Going out to collect enough tribal knowledge to actually know what is going on to then make recommendations from the data is not something that we do, nor are we encouraged by our Executives or our organization structures. This incentivizes data pukeing.
Often dashboard creators tend to be “outsiders” (Consultants, Experts etc) and they often don’t have deep practitioner experience that would allow them to understand the human / “below the surface” issues like the above three. That leads non-Practitioners to make the common mistakes like creating the above dashboards.
So does Avinash provide real advice as to how to avoid data pukes and create actionable dashboards? He sure does.
If you are on the front page of the Dashboard Spy blog, you may have to click on the following “Read More” link to see Avinash’s advice for “Action Dashboards”.
(more…)
Business Dashboard Topic: Facility Management Dashboards
While advising a facilities management subject matter expert, I came across a treasure trove of business intelligence dashboard presentations, white papers and other resources targeted specifically towards Facility Management professionals.
Dig right into these links:
White paper: Are Facility Professionals Using Dashboards?
[In the Facility Management community, the value add of Dashboards are just beginning to be
realized. If your organization collects data (and we know facilities departments typically collect a
lot of information) then funneling that data into a clear and concise Dashboard format can create
an effective tool for communicating business objectives to senior management. Dashboards often
speak the language of senior management; FMs who adopt these tools may be more effective in
communicating with senior management...]
And here is a deck for presenting business dashboard fundamentals to Facilities Management professionals interested in better KPI presentation:
Dashboards 101 for Facilities Management
And here are some examples of facility mgmt dashboards:
Parks Dept Facilities Management Dashboard
Pharmaceutical Facility Management Dashboard
12 Enterprise BI Platforms have been evaluated as part of the latest Forrester Wave study: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms Q3 2008. (Thanks goes to the Dashboard Spies who posted the findings document.)
Based on their evaluation of 151 criteria, Forrester finds that IBM/Cognos and SAP/Business Objects maintain market leading positions while Oracle and SAS Institute move up into leadership spots in enterprise BI because of their product functionality, scalability and completeness of corporate/product vision and strategy.
Here’s a diagram with the results of the BI platform evaluation:
A look at the relative scoring of the BI platforms compared across various criteria:
Click on the read more to find out more about the study of these BI platforms:
(more…)
What is Data Visualization?
Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, the definition can vary depending on one’s individual focus.
The Dashboard Spy blog brings us this smorgasbord of data visualization resources.
Here’s a couple of really excellent data visualization blogs:
http://blogstats.wordpress.com
http://eagereyes.org
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7073131.stm
http://www.infosthetics.com
Check the http://dashboardspy.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/data-visualization-references blog post for more.
I want to show you some very effective analytic dashboard layouts from a video delivery platform called Bits on the Run. For those of you who are not familiar with BOTR, it’s a service for transcoding and streaming videos on the Internet. It’s popular with bloggers who want to inexpensively host and publish their video content. What’s of real interest to me is the way the BOTR dashboards provide analytic image. Take a look at this screenshot:
Actually, a better way to get a sense of how these analytical reports are displayed and consumed is to actually watch them in action. Take a look at this video:
Unless you’re really interested in learning about posting video on the web, you’ll want to press forward to the 7 min. mark where the presenter starts showing you the dashboard screens and demonstrates the analytics available for each video. You’ll see that the screen show the number of video views, the number of page views, the total number of hours you, as well as analytics by day and engagement data. What’s particularly helpful to marketers is to watch how long the viewers watch each video. There is of course always a drop-off rate, but you can tell which videos really hold people’s interest by examining the user engagement data.
The Dashboard Spy needs more readers! Current subscribers of The Enterprise Dashboard Digest are asked to forward this email to business users, subject matter experts, project managers, database administrators, developers, business analysts, graphic designers and anyone else who needs to quickly build their expertise in business intelligence by studying actual examples of enterprise dashboards.
If you received this email from a colleague – Welcome to our business dashboard education project!
The newsletter is called The Enterprise Dashboard Digest and is a weekly compilation of dashboard examples, business intelligence posts and interesting videos about related topics.
You can sign up here if you are not currently on the distribution list:
The digest is a compilation from the following Dashboard Spy resources:
The Dashboard Spy Blog
The Dashboards by Example Blog
The Dashboards.TV Video Collection
The Dashboards.ORG Community
Here’s what the Enterprise Dashboard Digest looks like:
Regards,
Hubert Lee
The Dashboard Spy
The Google Sites platform is now available and all of the business dashboard community should immediately explore this new option for BI dashboarding. At least for quick mockups and prototypes, although you’ll find them quite suitable for standalone business dashboard applications. The Google Sites Dashboard is part of the Google Apps offerring. That means it is available at no cost. Dashboard Spy readers – did you hear that? A free, powerful dashboarding tool from Google is now available.
Think of Google Sites as an instant collaboration and community platform. It’s very Sharepoint in it’s functionality and approach.
Now, let’s look at the functionality and screen templates available from Google Sites. Here are some screenshots of various layouts including the dashboard page type. Remember, the idea is collaboration so think wikis, blogs, sharepoint, etc.
If you want to take a look at how one person used Google sites to power their community, take a look at Rich Hoeg’s Engineering Learning.
Here are some annotated screenshots from him on the various Google sites page types (including the dashboard page type).
Tags: Google Sites Dashboard, Google Sites Page Types
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…)
Dashboard Spy readers will no doubt notice that we have a new look and feel for The Dashboard Spy blog.
Yes, it was time for a fresh new look, but the impetus for the change was more from necessity.
It was reported to me last week that The Dashboard Spy newsletter triggered some sort of warning regarding redirection of site visitors. I’m not sure what was going on, but I decided to err on the side of caution and move the blog to another webhost.
So, I took the plunge and moved everything over to a fresh new server complete with new blog software and theme.
A special “thank you” goes out to the Dashboard Spy reader who provided me with the report.
Warmly,
Hubert Lee
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