Frequent contributor to The Dashboard Spy, Robert Allison, strikes again with his submission of an SAS/GRAPH enterprise dashboard that illustrates an example from the much-studied book from Stephen Few, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. As Robert explains:
Hopefully I’m not “hogging/overfilling” you with SAS dashboard samples? If I am, just let me know, and I’ll slow down!
Here’s yet another sample using SAS/Graph to implement a dashboard from Stephen Few’s new dashboard book. My first two were the Wine Sales Dashboard (p. 177) and the TeleSales Dashboard (p. 199).
This one is the “Web Marketing Analysis” dashboard (p. 201). I would think any company in the business of marketing products on the web would be well-positioned to take full advantage of a good dashboard (both in terms of data collection, and also having the technical skills to get the data into a dashboard).
Although this dashboard is not fancy/flashy, it does appear to contain some very well though-out metrics. This enterprise dashboard presented in a straightforward manner that is easy to understand.
The dashboard contains bullet graphs, sparklines, and bar charts with target-markers. You can see the interactive web version of this sample (along with the SAS code used to create it) on the following website - note that the bars have mouse-over html charttips (so you can see the exact data values), and the ‘www.’ names in the bottom/left chart have drilldown links to those websites (similarly, the product names, etc, could have drilldown links to that product in an online catalog).
Can you believe that Robert offerred to slow down? No way! Keep them coming, doc! It’s contributions like these that help build this dashboarding community into the most unique enterprise dashboard forum on the web. Thank you, Robert, and all the other Dashboard Spies out there for sharing your business dashboard passion.
Here is the web analysis dashboard screenshot:
Homework: Want to follow along with Robert’s examples? You’ll need the Stephen Few book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. And if you are new to SAS/GRAPH, of just not sure of what it is, check out these books on SAS/GRAPH.
So what or who is The Dashboard Spy? As his about page states, The Dashboard Spy is just a guy interested in the design of enterprise dashboards. He could not find any executive dashboard design source books (or even screenshots of real business dashboards) and so set about creating his own. Finally convinced to post his extensive collection of dashboard screenshots online, he was amazed to find how popular it has become. If you have a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s books on enterprise dashboards. His current favorite is Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing executive dashboards.
