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.
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:
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CIO Dashboard enables visibility of apps, systems and projects
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Allows CIO to drive by KPI
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CIO Dashboard will help lead to a lean efficient IT organization
The risks involved include:
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