Once again, the award winning Dr. Robert Allison has sent us the results of his SAS/GRAPH experiments (you didn’t know you can get awards for dashboarding, did you? Check here.) He decided to implement another of the dashboards from the Stephen Few dashboard book,Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.
“Hello Dashboard Spy. Here is another dashboard you might consider putting on your website. Previously I submitted the SAS/Graph version of the dashboard from p. 177 of Stephen Few’s new dashboard book. Thanks for the nice write-up! This time, I’m submitting the SAS/Graph version of the Telesales dashboard from p. 199 (with a few small changes – hopefully improvements. Same as before, this is created dynamically from the data (if the data changes, the dashboard will change when it’s re-run). My sas “ods html” version has html charttips and drilldowns, and a “SAS/Intrnet” version could even auto-refresh the graph every few seconds, and let the user click the Freeze/Unfreeze button to start & stop the auto-refreshing. This is all very do-able in SAS.”
Update: “Some people have asked about the sas code – you can find the sas code, and a “live” version of this dashboard (showing that it can support chart tips & drilldowns) on the following page:http://robslink.com/SAS/democd22/aaaindex.htm“.
Homework: Last time we featured Dr. Allison’s work with SAS/GRAPH, we got some feedback asking some questions, Here is a pointer to how Dr. Allison’s approach with another dashboard using SAS/GRAPH. See the section titled “How SAS/GRAPH Was Used to Create the Winning Dashboard”. If you are not sure of how to start with SAS/GRAPH 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 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 enterprise dashboards.