Contract Project KPIs tracked on Project Management Dashboard

This project management dashboard shows the billable and non-billable costs on contract projects.

The key performance measures (KPI) include

• Cost
• Percent of budget
• Billable cost
• Percent of cost
• Non-billable cost

Excel web query was used in this business dashboard to display and track gasoline prices from AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge Report.

Excel web query powers this fuel price report dashboard

Kaylan Verma (myxcelsius.com) is the creator of this dashboard and had this to say:

I used Excel Web Queries connected to AAA data. The data is being pulled from http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/. The IQY files were modified to pick up parameters from certain cells and those cells were dynamically changed by the List Box input. So when the user clicks on a state from the list box, it inserts the state value in the destination cell which is linked to the parameter of the Web Query. The web query is set to refresh when there is a change in the parameter cell.

The web query results were mapped to certain cells which make up the source data for the charts. I had to use Lookups since the web query had a state abbreviation in it.

Dashboard for security content logging and data mining

Regulatory, legal and compliance requirements now force companies to not only understand network activity from a threat perspective, but to proactively manage and mitigate certain protection measures and enforce acceptable use policies.

Here are some screenshots of a web security dashboard called FortiAnalyzer.

Web Security Dashboard

Customized security environment reports and graphs

Be sure to check out these dashboard examples of security management dashboards.

Dsahboards from The Dashboard Spy

Start your own blog about dashboards at http://dashboards.org

Marketing Key Performance Indicator Dashboard

This simple-looking, text-based dashboard tracks Marketing Management KPIs in a very straight-forward fashion.

The Marketing Management dashboard enables the marketing professionals to quickly determine the health of the marketing department. This dashboard contains the KPI region and reports on campaign to cash, campaign ROI, and budgets. The Marketing
Management dashboard facilitates comparing data of the current period with prior periods and helps analyze trends in lead generation, lead conversion, cost per lead, and revenue per lead, thereby providing historic trend data to plan future objectives.

The KPI region includes a snapshot of key performance data and enables marketing professionals to quickly assess the health of the marketing department. The KPIs present information on key marketing areas, such as lead generation, lead conversion, won opportunities amount, booked orders and so on. You can quantify, compare, measure, and track KPIs against prior periods to view historic trenddata. Some KPIs provide additional drill-down details, others display one level of summary data. By selecting a specific link within the region, you can drill down for more details.

Leads from Customers New Leads created during the selected period from existing customers. Customer is a person or an organization with which the company has a selling relationship, regardless of whether anything has actually been purchased or serviced. A customer is a party with a customer account.
Leads from Prospects New Leads created during the selected period from prospects. A prospect is a person or
organization, which the company, does not yet have a selling relationship.
‘A’ Leads Leads created during the specified period and
with a lead rank of ‘A’ as of the sys date.
‘A’ Leads % Leads created during the specified period and
with a lead rank of ‘A’ as of the sys date and as
a % of new leads.
New Opportunities Amount The sum of the sales credit amount of all opportunities with a marketing source created
within the specified period.
Won Opportunities Amount The sum of the sales credit amount of all opportunities with a marketing source that
have the:
• Close date within the selected current
period
• Closed flag set
• Won flag set

Cost Per Lead The marketing budgetary cost of generating all leads.
The Cost Per Lead displays expenses associated to each lead during the selected period. Based on the profile settings, either PTD Cost or Total Cost is displayed. Program cost calculations are defined from either the approved budget amount or the actual cost value.
Revenue Per Lead The booked revenue ratio resulting from all generated leads.
Lead to Opportunity Conversion Percentage of leads converted to opportunities during the specified period irrespective of when the leads were created.
Campaign Started Number of campaigns started during the selected period.
Events Started Number of events started during the selected period.

This dashboard screenshot shows a Project Portfolio Management Dashboard implemented with Microsoft Access. The system front end is constructed using OpenGate Software’s UI Buider for Microsoft Access.

As you see in the dashboard’s screenshot, you can track projects in your portfolio in terms of status and financial metrics. The dashboard system allows for the performance of cost/benefit analysis for the entire project portfolio as well as at the individual project level.

Microsoft Access dashboards make use of Access VB to enable system functionality. A demo for a Project Portfolio Management Template can be downloaded from Opengate.

Microsoft Access Dashboard Screenshot (click to enlarge):

Project Portfolio Management Dashboard Created with Microsoft Access

Tags: Microsoft Access Dashboards for Project Porfolio Tracking and Performance Management, MS Access Dashboard. opengate UI builder for Microsoft Access.

This example of a brand marketing dashboard is meant for a marketing executive to use as a daily check on brand management metrics. Among the high level metrics categories are Brand Metrics, Advertising Metrics, and Purchase Metrics. Here are the KPIs in each category:

• Brand Metrics
  • Brand Awareness
  • Brand Commitment
  • Brand Attributes
• Advertising Metrics
  • Advertising Awareness
  • Source of Ad Awareness
  • Message Association
• Purchase Metrics
  • Market Share
  • Frequency Profile
  • Repeat Purchase

Here is the marketing dashboard screenshot. Click on the image to enlarge it.

This brand marketing dashboard was implemented with Xcelsius

For more marketing dashboards, see:

Marketing Dashboard Best Practices

Also, see these Dashboard Experts

The Dashboard Spy is proud to announce the beta launch of a new dashboarding resource called Dashboards.TV. This unique dashboard video blog will feature videos of business dashboards, KPIs, Metrics, and other business intelligence material.

Use this link to visit the new service:

Dashboards

Video Blog about Dashboards and Business Intelligence

Dashboard Spy readers, let me know what you think. Would you watch videos about dashboards? If you have some good videos on youtube that you’d like me to post to Dashboards.TV, add the link to the comments below.

The Dashboard Spy

Looking for the 2008 Olympic Medal Count? Use this link for the Olympic Scoreboard:

Visit the iDashboards Beijing Olympics Scorecard.

Here is a screenshot of the medal count page:

Here is the Olympics Scorecard page:

The daily updated dashboard provides a summary of the day’s athletic results and an interactive world map highlights participating countries and corresponding medal tallies. The dashboards’ unique hover-and-click capabilities enable fans to drill down through each country’s results by sporting event and individual athlete performance. For Olympic enthusiasts, an additional dashboard provides even greater detail and the ability to compare results from across the globe with the help of graphic bar charts, speedometers, gauges, interactive country flags, and medals.

Tags: 2008 Olympic Medal Count, Beijing Olympics Dashboard, Olympic Scorecard, Olympic Dashboard, Olympics Dashboard

Did you know that the U.S. Navy consciously runs itself like a business enterprise? That includes embracing the value of enterprise dashboards and other business intelligence tools.

The Navy has an overarching program called Naval Aviation Enterprise (NAE) that is operated much like a $60 billion corporation. It’s overall vision is to “To deliver the right force with the right readiness at the right cost at the right time … today, and in the future.”

“It’s about collaborating, sharing and enhancing our business practices. Not to turn the Navy into a business, but to understand the business of the Navy so that we remain the most effective and efficient Navy in the world.”

– CNO Admiral Gary Roughead, March 2008

Let’s have a look at an enterprise dashboard (what the Navy likes to call Cockpit Charts) that monitors progress to goal in the area of mission readiness.

Here is a screenshot. In the interest of security, I’m showing a low-resolution image. Click on the “read more” link after the screen shot for a discussion of the relevant metrics used in this readiness dashboard.

Enterprise Dashboard used by the US Navy

Let’s have a look at the metrics featured on this enterprise dashboard:

The Navy has provided an explanation of the KPIs on this dashboard. The synopsis is presented in this image which lays out the explanations in a manner similar to the dashboard itself.

KPIs for Naval Aviation Enterprise Dashboard

For those truly interested in the nitty gritty, here is a closer look at one of the metrics as well as an overall explanation of the dashboard metrics.

Metrics used by the US Navy for mission readiness

Metrics, which are used to track and measure performance, are key elements to achieving cost-wise readiness.   Presenting that information to decision-makers and stakeholders can be daunting when different type/model/series (T/M/Ss), systems and missions are involved.   The Cockpit chart (CpC) is a set of seven graphics used by the Naval Aviation Enterprise (NAE) to depict Current Readiness information in a coherent, uniform and concise format.  The two main charts (called “panels”) are the Overall Mission-Rating (M-Rating) Accomplishment and the RFT (Ready for Tasking) Availability.  

The Overall M-Rating Accomplishment

Each T/M/S CpC includes result and driver measurements. Driver measurements are the issues that “drive” the results for readiness.  As the numbers in the driver panels change, so should the result panels.   Just like in an aircraft, CpCs monitor performance; one indicator does not reveal the entire health of a T/M/S.  The “panels” and “gauges” only alert leadership to the possibility of a problem that require deeper research and investigation to determine its root cause.

Dashboard Topic: Business Intelligence Whitepapers

The Dashboard Spy is now collecting the best business intelligence dashboard white papers and business trade magazines for his readers to read and learn from.

Recently featured are the following two white papers on dashboard best practices:

Business Intelligence Best Practices for Dashboard Design by Information Builders

Worst Practices in Business Intelligence by Information Builders

Come visit the Dashboards by Example Featured White Papers and Trade Magazines.

Tags: IT Whitepapers, The Dashboard Spy

Dashboards, whether business intelligence dashboards, or software application dashboards, are best understood when experienced directly. It can be quite difficult to explain in words how certain dashboards work. That’s the challenge when writing and discussing enterprise dashboard software. Often, however, it’s not always possible for you to access the dashboards we study. That’s why The Dashboard Spy has become so popular. We’ll include detailed screenshots of the digital dashboards (as we do on Dashboards by Example), or sometimes, even video coverage of the business dashboard (see this Dashboard Spy Video).

A pet peeve of mine is when I come across literature from business intelligence vendors that discuss business dashboard technology and dashboards at length without including screenshots. I come across this quite a bit and it just irks me.

A couple of years ago, a Dashboard Spy reader pointed me to this Microsoft article about an Isreali Police Department dashboard case study and asked if I would please track down some screenshots of the dashboard.

Well, it took almost two years, but here are some screenshots of the performance dashboard used by the Isreali police to track over 100 KPIs for their 27,000 officers. The technology behind the performance dashboard is Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005.

Click on the examples to enlarge the screenshots. These digital dashboards are in Hebrew, so I can’t tell you exactly which metrics are shown on these screens.

Tags: Digital Dashboard Example, Isreali Police Dashboards

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

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:

First, select a customer:

Then here is the Silverlight dashboard:

And here is the video I captured of the Infragistics Silverlight dashboard. Click on the image to visit the video.

Tags: Silverlight dashboard, customer dashboards

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:

• 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

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.

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

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

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

Dashboard examples continue to be added to the collection of dashboard screenshots over at the Dashboard Examples Volume 1 blog. In case, you’ve forgotten, that’s the new location of this blog about business intelligence dashboards. Be sure to check out the dashboards.

Here is a recap of recent dashboards featured over at new The Dashboard Spy blog:

A Dynamic Presentation of Data on a BBC Dashboard:

5 Rules for Dashboard Design by Avinash:

Hospital Bed Management Dashboard System with Excel Dashboard Download:

In-flight Project Status Dashboard done in Xcelsius:

Security Operations Center Dashboard (a look at an upcoming product):

Marketing Campaign Dashboard in SharePoint

Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius Dashboard: