Service Desk Dashboard - tracking support call KPIs for a helpdesk operation

This peek at a support desk KPI enterprise dashboard comes from a company running the HEAT service management suite to optimize its IT service functions. The IT group takes the performance data as input for this call data dashboard. KPIs include number of open calls, escalated calls, calls received today, percentage of annual daily average, closed calls, calls more than 3 weeks old and a statistic that I really like - calls not updated in the last 7 days. I feel that this statistic is important in terms of customer satisfaction. The client obviously wants fast action. As the open call ages, the satisfaction index would obviously decrease. The 7 day mark seems like a good spot for some “We’re working on it” contact.

Homework: Study up on this subject with these books on help desk management.

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.

Vendor Compliance Scorecard - Enterprise Dashboard for Service Level Agreements

Here we look at how one company tracks the performance of their vendors. First, a note about their vendor management philosophy in general. Upon establishing a relationship with a partner company, a service level agreement is reached and written into the contracts. There is a governance process to overseeing the vendor relationships that is taken quite seriously.  As the relationship matures, data collection and analysis is constantly done. The IT department established an SLA Portal with this Vendor Compliance Scorecard as the main tool. The dashboard shown below brings up a real pet peeve of mine. I can’t stand unclear tab onstates. For example, take a look at the two tabs in this dashboard. One says Vendor Breach Summary for last Month and the other says Vendor Compliance. Can someone please tell me which is the on state? On dashboard after dashboard, I find unclear tabs. The top level tab line is clear. It is obvious that we are on the dashboard tab as the red on the tab continues directly under it to the horizontal bar. On the second level however, there is a white line that separates the tab from the bar. I would guess that the vendor compliance tab is on, however, it is not 100% clear to me.

Homework: Can we stop designing by accident and take a moment to study some basic principles of graphic design? Take a look right now at The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type. A great source of sample dashboard designs is this book: Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

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.

Cell Phone & PDA Business Dashboards - Why aren’t enterprise dashboards part of the mobile revolution yet?

Anybody out there got a dashboard in their pocket? Some enterprise dashboard enthusiasts and I were talking about the dearth of mobile applications in the business dashboard space. Where are all the business dashboards on people’s phones and PDAs? I checked my collection of executive dashboard screenshots and really could not come up with compelling examples of mobile business dashboards. Here is a screenshot of a pocket pc application from 2003 that really never took off. A framework was created for a business dashboard application called  ExecutiveAware. It ran on Microsoft’s Pocket PC platform. The client handled the UI and all that was streamed down to the device was the raw data. The dashboard chart shown here running on the iPAQ looks slick, but how come it didn’t catch on? Anybody else have screenshots of this or any other enterprise dashboard app?

So who is the Dashboard Spy? No one really knows, but his growing collection of enterprise dashboard screenshots has captured the imagination of the executive dashboarding community. From excel dashboards and custom-built business scorecards, to xcelsius and flex-based visualizations, the dashboard screenshots at dashboardspy.com serve both as nuggets of inspiration and warnings of what not to do on an enterprise dashboard. These hits and misses will enlighten and entertain. Technology-neutral, and always business-driven, the Dashboard Spy website is the place to go to learn about the latest enterprise dashboard packages. Check out the Dashboard Spy’s latest recommended book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

Communications Performance Management Dashboard - Using Xcelsius to display internal communication KPIs

In a recent post regarding communications and public relations enterprise dashboards, I showed some work by theleanagency.biz, a communications agency in London that is using Xcelsius dashboard technology to provide their clients with measurements of their communications programs. I focused on the relevant KPIs in that post but did not do justice to the actual dashboards. I snooped around, using typically sneaky Dashboard Spy techniques, and now have a large screenshot of their Internal Communications Dashboard and present it for your study here.

Note that while, this executive dashboard is done in Crystal Xcelsius (used most often for “what-if style dashboards”), it does so mostly using only the “view-only” modes. There is interactivity for the date selection dropdown and descriptive data mouseovers in the KPI charts, so Xcelsius is shown to be a fine choice for read-only dashboards as well.

Here is the executive dashboad screenshot. A listing of the relevant KPIs follow:

Homework: Usabilty is key when presenting to the end user through a dashboard. Study up on the discipline of usability. Start with these usability books. Also, as these dashboards are executed in the easy-to-use Xcelsius, take a look at the book, Crystal Xcelsius For Dummies .

So who is the Dashboard Spy? No one really knows, but his growing collection of enterprise dashboard screenshots has captured the imagination of the executive dashboarding community. From excel dashboards and custom-built business scorecards, to xcelsius and flex-based visualizations, the dashboard screenshots at dashboardspy.com serve both as nuggets of inspiration and warnings of what not to do on an enterprise dashboard. These hits and misses will enlighten and entertain. Technology-neutral, and always business-driven, the Dashboard Spy website is the place to go to learn about the latest enterprise dashboard packages. Check out the Dashboard Spy’s latest recommended book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

Excel Executive Dashboard with Sparklines - big ideas for small enterprise dashboards

Thanks to the Dashboard Spy in Germany who sent us this wonderful excel executive dashboard to study. It features an amazing amount of information packed into a tiny space (which is what the at-a-glance nature of the dashboard is all about!). The big secret, of course, is the tiny, little device called the Sparkline. Invented by the truly innovative Edward Tufte, it is a clever inline way to give a user a sense of scale, trend and historic movement of a statistic.

The dashboard itself deals with airline management. If it looks familiar to you, an earlier version of this airline dashboard graced the pages of the Dashboard Spy blog several weeks ago. It was the winner of a business intelligence contest. This current version is smaller and, in my opinino, cooler.

As Andreas from Bonavistasystems.com pointed out, this sparkline-driven excel dashboard is really optimized to be tiny:

All figures are formatted with Gill Sans MT 8 pt. The sparklines are formatted with Micro Line Charts 8 pt. The whole dashboard presents 340 figures on 420 x 420 pixels screen real estate. We build new hinted fonts that allow us to format colored sparklines as small as 8 pt without faint or hidden lines.

It was built with the new release of MicroCharts: http://www.bonavistasystems.com/DownloadMicroCharts.html

 Here is the executive dashboard. Take a look at these great sparklines!

Homework: If you have not been exposed to Edward Tufte’s work, you must browse these pages of books by Tufte. Design and information architecture are the most critical items to an enterprise dashboard’s success. Particularly with the executive crowd, know what you are doing in terms of laying out the dashboard. Well worth studying is this lavishly illustrated book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

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.

Nursing Quality Metrics - Using executive dashboards to improve healthcare

Yesterday’s focus on The Dashboard Spy on how hospitals and other health care facilities use enterprise dashboards brought out a question on whether any organizations are using executive dashboards to track nursing quality. I checked my extensive collection of executive dashboard screenshots (I’m still waiting for someone to challenge my claim on having the world’s largest collection of dashboard samples) and while I didn’t find a nursing quality dashboard, I did locate some graphics of nursing quality metrics used at University of California San Francisco School of Nursing.  They have an enterprise dashboard dedicated to improving nursing quality. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get a hold of a screenshot, but I do have a look at some of the KPIs that they use and some screenshots of a similiar dashboard in place there. We start with this nice list of nursing quality KPIs. They include Operational Metrics such as RN turnover, filled positions, patient:RN ratio, skill sets, overtime, evaluations. Quality metrics include Falls, Falls with Injury (yikes!), medication errors, narcotics wastage, etc.  I like seeing the Satisfaction Metrics (rarely exposed) including: Overall satisfaction with nursing care, likelihood of recommending the hospital, satisfaction with pain control, overall rating of nursing unit, and perioperative feedback.

Homework: Involved with hospital management? Know the score about measuring clinical practice with the book The Power Of Clinical And Financial Metrics: Achieving Success In Your Hospital (American College of Helathcare Executives Management Series).

So who is the Dashboard Spy? No one really knows, but his growing collection of enterprise dashboard screenshots has captured the imagination of the executive dashboarding community. From excel dashboards and custom-built business scorecards, to xcelsius and flex-based visualizations, the dashboard screenshots at dashboardspy.com serve both as nuggets of inspiration and warnings of what not to do on an enterprise dashboard. These hits and misses will enlighten and entertain. Technology-neutral, and always business-driven, the Dashboard Spy website is the place to go to learn about the latest enterprise dashboard packages. Check out the Dashboard Spy’s latest recommended book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

Hospital Enterprise Management Dashboard - managing health care facility KPIs with executive dashboards

From Cincinatti comes a couple of executive dashboard screenshots used at a hospital there to track profitability metrics. It is a popular main front-end tool for the Chief Financial Officer’s staff to pull financial reports. The first dashboard screenshot shows, on the right side of the screen, a panel where you can toggle the various reports and KPIs that you can show on the dashboard. The second executive dashboard screenshot shows some of the sophisticated graphing that dashboard users can use. This particular shot shows a bubble graph visualization of the profitability of a patient stay with length of stay as a variable.

Homework: If you are a health care professional and need to study up on the financial side of your business, start with the book, Financial Analysis and Decision Making for Healthcare Organizations: A Guide for the Healthcare Professional.

Note: If you are on an enterprise dashboard project, do yourself a favor and take a look at Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT, the only book on actually implementing enterprise dashboards.

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 nice screenshot of a digital dashboard, balanced scorecard, or any business intelligence graphic to share, please send an email to info _at_ dashboardspy.com. Also check out The Dashboard Spy’s favorite books on business dashboards.

Goal Tracking Dashboard - making plans & keeping metrics on business objectives

Here are a couple of executive dashboard screenshots from an executive success coaching product called Best Year Yet. It’s an approach that’s big on making plans in advance and tracking your adherance to the plan. The first screenshot shows a tracking dashboard at the executive level. It shows the results by month of the distribution, executive, HR, marketing and production teams. The months are rated by color with a color key at the bottom of the chart. The second dashboard screenshot shows how the metrics are inputted.

Note: Hey, Dashboard Spies!: Do you know how smart you are getting by reading The Dashboard Spy? From pig production to airplane crew size optimization to monitoring presidential campaigns, we’ve examined enterprise dashboards from all aspects of business. I’ll do my share to keep snooping around for those elusive dashboard screenshots that keep this dashboard screenshot collection interesting.

So who is the Dashboard Spy? No one really knows, but his growing collection of enterprise dashboard screenshots has captured the imagination of the executive dashboarding community. From excel dashboards and custom-built business scorecards, to xcelsius and flex-based visualizations, the dashboard screenshots at dashboardspy.com serve both as nuggets of inspiration and warnings of what not to do on an enterprise dashboard. These hits and misses will enlighten and entertain. Technology-neutral, and always business-driven, the Dashboard Spy website is the place to go to learn about the latest enterprise dashboard packages. Check out the Dashboard Spy’s latest recommended book, Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.