Tooltip Dashboard

Here’s a quick Dashboard Design Tip from The Dashboard Spy.

Consider the use of mini tooltip dashboards.

Your business dashboard is for graphically showing the state of your business metrics in an easy-to-digest fashion, isn’t it? Well then, don’t forget to take advantage of every facet of your BI dashboard application to keep up that visual information theme. What do I mean?

Take tool tips for example. You can put data into hover-over tooltips like this of course.

A plain list like this:

Can turn into something informationally richer with tooltips such as this:

But how about going further and turning each tooltip into a little dashboard complete with red/yellow/green status indicators like this?

Let’s see these mini tooltip dashboards on your next business intelligence reporting project!

Tags: Dashboard Design, Tooltip Dashboards

 

Silverlight Dashboard

Here at the Dashboard Spy, we have been keenly observing the development of the various RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies and their applicability towards business intelligence dashboards. We’ve looked at plenty of AJAX, FLEX/Flash and mashup dashboards, but now let’s examine a Silverlight dashboard. Yes, Silverlight business dashboards are hard to come by, but Infragistics has produced quite a nice demo.

In terms of background, Silverlight is a Microsoft technology. It is a framework for providing rich applications to the web browser and is generally thought of as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash. Unlike Flash, however, Silverlight applications are delivered to a browser in a text-based markup language called XAML. This means that search engines can scan XAML (as opposed to not being able to look inside compiled Flash applications), giving Silverlight an edge in terms of search engine optimization.

Here are some screenshots of the Infragistics Silverlight demo. The interactive demo is called faceOut and can be found at http://labs.infragistics.com/silverlight/faceout/. You’ll need to have Silverlight 2 installed on your machine to view the demo. Hit the more link further down on this page and look for a video of the dashboard if you don’t wish to install Silverlight at this time.

Here are some screenshots.

Here is what you get if you don’t have Silverlight installed:

Here are some screenshots of the sales dashboard:

Church Dashboard with iGoogle Gadgets

Should we build our business intelligence dashboards or buy our dashboards off the shelf? The Buy vs. Build decision has been a point of consideration for IT management since the dawn of MIS departments. Given the scarcity of off-the-shelf BI dashboard products “back-in-the-day”, we mostly built our own primitive (but functional) scorecards and dashboards. We developed a “build it ourselves” outlook that took many years for packaged software vendors to overcome.  Things do change, however. With the advent and subsequent ubiquity of enterprise reporting packages came the preference of many for using installed solutions to knock out quick dashboards.

The explosion of Web 2.0 websites and technologies has created an environment that now merges the choices of “Buy” and “Build” into “Leverage freely available new technologies and approaches”. What do I mean? One cannot click more than a couple of times in today’s web without stumbling across technology that can be leveraged for our business intelligence dashboard projects. APIs are available that offer services that were unheard of (at any price, much less at no cost!) back a few years ago.  I speak of web services from companies such as Google, Amazon, Ebay, etc that allow a “mash-up” of dashboard applications. See the post on a Mashup Dashboard on Dashboards by Example.

Getting to today’s Business Dashboard Example, let’s look at how someone is leveraging the iGoogle API to provide a dashboard geared towards Church management.

As you know, the Google Personalized Homepage has been around since 2005. There was a major change in April of 2007 with a rebranding as “iGoogle”. The service was expanded and the iGoogle API allowed anyone to create a module called a Google Gadget. Google also allows users to create gadgets online through a gadget interface.

Here is the dashboard screenshot:

Dashboard examples like this one and a thousand others can be found at Dashboards by Example, a Dashboard Spy project.

 

Benefits and Risks of the CIO Dashboard

The Dashboard Spy has been posting at Dashboards by Example and The Dashboard Spy Blog for quite a while now, but many people searching for various business intelligence topics still find Dashboard Spy screenshots at this original address.

As a nod to the continuing power of this original Dashboard Spy Collection of Digital Dashboards, I thought I’d throw up a brand new post. It’s a sample of the type of content you’ll find at the new sites, so be sure to come over and join your fellow digital dashboard enthusiasts!

Dashboard Topic: The Risks and Rewards of a CIO Dashboard

In the upcoming issue of Information Week, there is a great article on CIO Dashboards called “Hunting the Elusive CIO Dashboard“. I’ll summarize some of the points in a moment, but take a look first at this great table showing pros and cons of CIO Dashboards:

As you see, there are both benefits and risks when it comes to a CIO Dashboard project. The main areas of challenge are selecting the appropriate KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and getting the data sources ready for consumption by the dashboard.

The benefits of the CIO Dashboard:

• CIO Dashboard enables visibility of apps, systems and projects
• Allows CIO to drive by KPI
• CIO Dashboard will help lead to a lean efficient IT organization

The risks involved include:

• CIO Dashboard will expose inefficient IT organization processes and data gaps
• Poorly defined KPIs may cause mismanagement
• Costly to implement

Here are 8 Steps to Prepare for the CIO Dashboard:

 

A great article with content valuable to the business intelligence dashboard community. Check it out.

Tags: CIO Dashboards, CIO Dashboard Benefits and Risks, Digital Dashboard

  

More Recent Posts from Dashboards By Example

All Dashboard Spy readers should update their bookmarks and RSS feeds. The main Dashboard Spy site is located at http://dashboardspy.com. The Dashboards by Example Blog is located at http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com where you’ll find listings of the dashboard examples.

Here are some recent dashboard examples that you may have missed:

Oracle Portal Dashboards

 

Sparklines with Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager

Incident and Threat Management Dashboard

Tags: Recap of Dashboards at Dashboards By Example blog.

Web Standard Templates for MS SharePoint

Update: The author of the blog post referenced below has updated the blog with an important post titled  SharePoint 2007 - Pointedly Unskinnable. It’s a big reversal of the original point that Sharepoint could be skinned with web standard templates. 

The author says, for example:

Well, it turns out SharePoint 2007 isn’t nearly as customizable as I (and others) were led to believe. Not even close in some cases. Given the amount of exposure my original article garnered, I feel obligated to share what I’ve learned since. 

Go check out the new post now. It’s a big deal.

Here is the original Dashboard Spy post about the first post on Skinning MS SharePoint with Standards.

>>>>>>

A Dashboard Spy reader contacted me with some questions about using MicroSoft SharePoint Server for dashboarding. I pointed her to several SharePoint Dashboard videos on the dashboard screenshot blog - Dashboards By Example.  After we jointly studied a couple more dashboards done in SharePoint, our discussion turned to how compliant Sharepoint was in terms of web standards.  Also, we covered the topic of how easy was it to customize the look and feel of Sharepoint. The lastest version has made ui customization much easier. I remember struggling with even simple tasks like putting in custom banners.

I shared a great resource on customizing the look of SharePoint with that Dashboard Spy reader and I’d like to share it with you as well.

Take a look at this post called Skinning MS SharePoint with Standards. It has a very nice list of resources concerning the topic of web standards and Microsoft SharePoint.

Here’s a quick peek at the before and after screenshots from the post.

This is the out-of-the-box styling:

 

 And this is the look that was achieved after customization.

Definitely check out the post as well as the blog. It’s got some great content.

Tags: Sharepoint Dashboards

Song about Dashboards and BI

Dashboard designers know how executives, project sponsors and business users love bells and whistles on their dashboards. In fact, much of our time is spent towards protecting over-excited design participants from themselves. Just look at how the information visualization crowd goes totally nuts when gradients appear in pie charts (or, for that matter, when pie charts are chosen instead of those teeny weeny sparklines!).

In the spirit of unnecessary multimedia elements in business dashboards, I proudly present a song about the business intelligence dashboard. What? Is there such a thing? Of course, it’s the Dashboard Spy theme song!

Have a listen and tell me what you think:

The Dashboard Spy Theme Song

Ask The Dashboard Spy Video Tutorials Launched

Dashboard Spy readers can now have their dashboarding questions answered by the Dashboard Spy in video format. “Ask The Dashboard Spy” is a series of video tutorials that explore various business intelligence dashboard topics.

The first video is about “Coding Dashboard Portlets in HTML” and it explains a nifty trick on how to produce a live pie chart that displays your latest data. This dashboard tutorial is meant as an introduction to coding and will be of interest to dashboard project team members who have always wanted to get more technical.

Use the link above to view the dashboard video on the main Dashboard Spy site.

Here is a look at the portlet that you will see implemented. The HTML and CSS is straight-forward. The magic comes in how we code the pie chart. Using google docs spreadsheet web services, we can easily implement a live pie chart that is driven by values on a web-based spreadsheet.

Tags: Ask The Dashboard Spy Video Tutorial, Coding Dashboard Portlets in HTML, Dashboard Software