Dashboard

If poring over another year’s worth of business intelligence dashboards has taught me anything, it’s that the very form and structure of a digital dashboard is what gives it such value and utility. We’ve heard it said over and over from many a dashboard design guru that a dashboard should be a single page, easy-to-absorb, summary of your most key performance indicators. I agree that this “at-a-glance” nature of a business dashboard is its most core attribute.

Just as imagery can be such a powerful device in poetry, the snapshot that a dashboard provides can be the strongest call-to-action for corporate managers. Think of a dashboard as the haiku form of business intelligence. What is more compelling - a 30 page printed report or a handful of charts and alerts right there on the screen in front of you?

The fact that we are constrained by the screen real estate of a single page dashboard forces us to prioritize. During the dashboard design process, we are challenged to indentify the KPIs and metrics that most matter to us. The fact that we can only select 4 charts, for example, means that those 4 charts must be the most meaningful.

Looking through all those dashboard screenshots during this last year, however, has shown me that the world of dashboard content is limitless. What particular chart or metric shows up on my dashboard or your dashboard does not mean that it is what is desired by our coworkers. The content of a dashboard doesn’t even have to be driven by databases that we own. Dashboard portlets can contain navigation elements to other systems, mini applications, images or anything else of value to the user.

We have looked at the concept of enterprise dashboards as mashups. Many business intelligence gurus are forecasting mashups as a huge trend for dashboards in 2009.

A recent podcast by BriefingsDirect titled “Analyts Make 2009 Predictions for Enterprise IT, SOA, Cloud and Business Intelligence” examines the major trends for IT in 2009. Click on the link for the transcript and the podcast itself. Note the emphasis on mashup dashboards as part of “Extreme BI” as driven by end user needs.

We’ll see more BI become social networking, in the sense of mashup as a style of BI application, reporting, dashboards, and development. Mashups for user self-service BI development will come to the fore. It will be a huge theme in the BI space in 2009 and beyond of that.

Finally, let me point out that from the view point of the end user, dashboards in general (and mashup dashboards in particular) have become more accessible that ever. Without the intervention of the IT department, business users can create their own mashup dashboards right now.

We’ve looked at how easy and powerful Google Sites dashboards can be. Check out that link to see some awesome free dashboard templates from Google. We’ve looked at Google Sites for Project management dashboards as well.

On those earlier posts, we didn’t look under the hood at exactly how the Google Sites dashboards allow for mashup of content, so let’s take a quick peek now.

Here is the configuration mode for the Google Sites dashboard template. Note how each dashboard portlet can be configured with whatever content you want. Pick from whatever content you would find helpful on your personal dashboard. Truely, it’s a dashboard end users world now. Welcome to 2009.

Tags: Configuration of Google Sites Dashboard, Mashup Dashboards, Extreme BI, business intelligence dashboards, year of the mashup dashboard

Depending on your philosophy and business model, information may or may not be freely copied and shared. Like it or not, however, mass copying and distribution of practically any web content is occurring at blindingly fast speeds. You wouldn’t believe how far and wide the Dashboard Spy commentary on business intelligence dashboards goes because of unauthorized distribution for the purposes of search engine optimization based monetization.

Content tracking company Attributor creates dashboards that help track the extent of copyright infringement occuring with content posted on popular websites. In a study of copyright infringement occurring with online recipes, their researchers found that there are over 10,000 copies of recipes that originated on three popular food sites. You can read about the study on the rampant copying of recipes online here. In many cases, the copied versions of the content ranks above the original versions in the search engine results.

Let’s take a look at a dashboard that tracks the appearance of content across the web.

Two graphs show the numbers of new matches of any sort of copying and what they call “extensive” copying. A match is defined as any two items in which a certain percentage of the content was identical.

The business driver for such analysis revolves around the idea of “lost” traffic to the “sploggers” who steal content and place their own pages with the stolen content higher up in the search engine rankings than the original. It is estimated that popular recipe sites lose up to 400,000 to 800,000 monthly visits to the unauthorized versions of their recipes.

Steal my dashboards, please!

Tags: Dashboards for tracking copyright infringement, attributor dashboard, recipe dashboard

The “freemium” business model - now common among Web 2.0 services (where the basic service is free because of the subsidy from the premium features) - calls for careful tracking of the numbers. Grabbing eyeballs via the free content is easy. Converting them to paying customers for your premium service is the challenge.

Today’s Dashboards by Example case study comes from dashboard vendor Sisense and examines dashboards used by Wix.com, a very interesting online flash website creator that offers drag and drop ease to the myspace crowd.

First, let’s take a look at a screenshot of the web analytics dashboard used by Wix.

Here’s the case study itself:

Wix.com: Using Business Intelligence for Instant Web Analytics and Reporting

Wix.com, a leader in fast and easy graphical content generation on the web, uses SiSense’s Prism to assist it in the process of optimizing traffic generation and converting its users to premium services.

Using web analytics to drive user conversion

Wix is a content generation tool for high-end graphics web sites. Wix lets you make stunning flash web pages with no more effort than creating presentation slides.
The Wix beta launched in mid 2008 as a free service. In late 2008 Wix revealed its monetization model – charge users $5-10 for premium features. As of writing this case study (November, 2008), there are over a quarter million Wix users, all of them power users who use Wix to build several sites and generate a large amount of content. Wix had become, in a relatively short while, a very complex site. Monetization became a process that needs to be closely monitored and managed.

Ad-hoc MySQL Analysis and Reporting – easy, quick and lowest cost

“The site mushroomed; there are 20 million views of Wix widgets and a similar count of page views. There are multiple traffic sources and a conversion process that is relatively lengthy” begins Avishai Avrahami, Co-founder and CEO of Wix. Part of his role is to optimize conversion and understand it, managing AdWords, traffic sources and a host of other drivers.

The data comes in from the Wix application, Google AdWords and Wix billing. “It had taken some time to set up all the data in MySQL”, says Avrahami, “this took the most time”. Now Wix required access and analysis. “I needed to find what I call a ‘presentation layer’ for the data”, he explains.

Finding the right tool for rapid analysis and fast report creation

Web Analytics at Wix is a succession of real-time ad-hoc analytics and then reporting of the results. Reports are distributed several times a day. “The management team wants to see what drives conversion, which of our traffic sources are profitable and by how much” says Avrahami.

He tried some of the classic reporting tools. “We live in the digital age” he says of them, scrolling down one of the ten Prism dashboards he uses. “I never print my reports so tools that require me to define pages for printing are out of the question.”

Google Analytics, although useful for a high level snapshot, was not granular enough. “Analytics systems like Google Analytics are very rigid”, says Avrahami “When you drill down all you do is change some parameters, but you still end up looking at the same user group from a different angle”.

Avrahami can write SQL queries, and the company had no shortage of IT staff or programmers. But writing SQL queries for quick and dirty ad hoc analysis took too long. It wasn’t accessible to less technical members of the marketing team. It also required a full time employee and several hours to check each hypothesis.

Using Prism: fast, cheap and exactly what Wix needed

It was then that Avrahami happened upon SiSense Prism. It was exactly what he was looking for. “Setting up Prism took a fraction of the time of setting up MySQL” he says. “Prism lets us create a visible system for the management team. We didn’t need fancy visualization; we needed a front end that lets us quickly research a hunch. We can then send everyone the results as a report. We’re a curious bunch: every day someone else has an idea of how to optimize the system. With Prism we can check it immediately and then, in a matter of minutes, publish a report for everyone to see”. Since the reports are interactive, they let viewers filter, sort and sum the data.

Avrahami points at one of the Prism widgets he often uses: time aggregations (by week, day, month, quarter). “I can do this in SQL” he says “but I need to be able to generate a report in a minute. I love the ability to analyze the data at the marketing level without asking the R&D people to do this. Using prism profoundly affected the way Wix conducts their business. “Prism allowed us to immediately change the way we use our channels and drive traffic”.

How

Reports are generated to see:

• How many premium users sourced from which domain.
• Analyze how each traffic source generates revenues.
• Figure out where users are lost in the acquisition process, a multiple step process, and what and how long it takes for a user to become a power user.
• How to price traffic sources.
• Time to purchase of various user groups and optimize sales efforts accordingly.

This dashboard is the main Wix dashboard (the actual numbers have been modified). Click to enlarge.

This dashboard shows new users and new pages for a given period and serves as the main entry point into analysis.

The following dashboard tracks user behavior, looking at time to monetization of new users, as a function of how they use the Wix tools:

The last dashboard also compares use of Wix to conversion, focusing mainly on the amount of sites powered by Wix.

Tis the season to make your lists and check them twice, isn’t it? Business intelligence practitioners among the Dashboard Spy readership know that the right business analytics and dashboards make all the difference between a smooth holiday season and one full of fulfillment mishaps. It turns out that Santa implemented several new business intelligence systems up at the North Pole. Seems that the elves were pitching a dashboard project to help monitor key metrics and KPIs. In this post, we’ll examine several BI systems that good old Kris Kringle launched just in time for the holiday season.

First, thanks goes to veteran dashboarder Robert Allison for providing Santa Claus with this Santa Dashboard. It’s an interactive dashboard, so be sure to try out the various drill-downs at that link. Here is the screenshot of the dashboard.

I made a santa dashboard video and set it to some holiday music:

Next, we examine another Santa Dashboard, this time courtesy of the dashboarders at DSPanel. Their Santa Sharepoint Dashboard has a nice merry tune also, so be sure to check it out at that link.

Finally, via TK’s BI and the Chicken Pot Pie, comes the revelation that Santa is a SAS Business Analytics customer. Check out this Santa Business Analytics video.

Here’s a screenshot of a happy elven business intelligence analyst. His name is Alabaster Snowball and he’s the VP of Analytics up at the North Pole:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from The Dashboard Spy!

Tags: Dashboard, Santa’s Dashboards, Santa Business Analytics

Manufacturing systems look to optimize flows within the production lines. OEE or Overall Equipment Effectiveness is the study of production assets (machinery) in order to eliminate bottlenecks and identify areas of poor performance or excess capacity. The underlying idea is that you can create a combined measurement of equipment availability, performance rate and quality rate (Availability times Performance Rate times Quality Rate). Several years ago, we looked at how a software product called OEE Impact Connect used a Bottling Line Dashboard to monitor metrics on the shop floor. Today, at the request of a Dashboard Spy reader who just got assigned to a dashboard project within a shop floor environment, we examine other screenshots from that OEE dashboard platform.

Apologies for the small size of this screenshot, but here is an overview dashboard of a manufacturing environment. This screenshot and the ones that follow are from resources located at the oeeimpact.com site.

This is the dashboard studied previously. It’s for monitoring a bottling operation.

Here is an annotated view of the bottling line dashboard. Note that at each station along the production line, there is a computer monitor. That is where the line operator can enter data about the current production run.

Here is a look at the data entry interface that would appear on those monitors. Line operators punch in data during the course of a production run. Downtime metrics are captured in this manner. Obviously, this requires establishment of standard operating procedures and worker training.

Once the data is captured, you can of course, start producing all sorts of reports and monitoring dashboards.

In this manufacturing production asset dashboard, you can group assets and report on production metrics based on shifts.

You can create dashboard or scoreboard views that target specific production processes.

Historical analysis of Overall Equipment Effectiveness metrics is always important:

And of course, Excel can be part of the dashboarding mix:

More information on OEE can be found in this OEE Online Tutorial.

You can also view this Manufacturing OEE video. It explains the OEE calculation and introduces relevant concepts.

Tags: OEE Dashboards, Overall Equipment Effectiveness Scorecards

Business dashboards communicate information to various stakeholders across the enterprise. The challenge has been to make sure that the message gets through to the intended audience. I’ve posted in the past of how one company, Serence (now Klipfolio - more on that in a moment.) has tackled the idea of “the unvoidable dashboard“, by developing the idea of placing dashboards right on the computer desktop. The idea is simple. Why make users log into an application, when the information can be seen at a glance right on the dashboard?

Today’s dashboard screenshot is a Klipfolio Desktop Dashboard that explicitly focuses on internal communication of news across an enterprise. Take a look at this little dashboard that users would find on their desktops. Here is the company’s pitch for an internal communication desktop dashboard and description of the use case:

Klipfolio Dashboard for Internal Communications.Cut through the chatter with employee communications on the desktop.

Change the channel - Internal communication is vital to keep your workforce aligned, informed, and safe. But organizational communication competes for attention with every other kind of workplace interaction. Customers, suppliers, managers, peers, family, and news feeds bombard your audience. Direct lines and mobile phones ring; inboxes and intranets fill up; even the bulletin board in the kitchenette is heaving.

Cut through the communications chatter by changing the channel. Add active employee alerts and passive notifications to their desktop with an enterprise dashboard widget.

Abandon the communications ghetto - How do you promote the CEO’s message, the company picnic, or a community event with messages that are deleted before they’re seen? Two hundred emails a day isn’t uncommon for information workers. And nobody’s looking for another meeting.

Corporate intranets are supposed to help address the corporate communications challenge. But the reality is often a ghetto of confusing micro sites rather than a communications nerve center.

Klipfolio comes to mind today because of some news released by the company. Serence has now changed its name to Klipfolio and relaunched the Klipfolio.com website.

Here is the news release:

Klipfolio is the Desktop Dashboard for Business
Dashboard Software Firm Consolidates Brands to Concentrate on Operational Performance Management Market

OTTAWA, ONTARIO, Dec 11, 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) — Klipfolio Inc., the developer of Klipfolio Dashboard, today announced its new statement of direction to extend its success with desktop dashboards under the Serence brand to concentrate on the operational performance management market as Klipfolio Inc. The announcement is supported by the simultaneous launch of a new Web site at http://www.klipfolio.com.

The move consolidates two successful lines of business for the desktop dashboard firm under a single recognized brand. The Serence line of branded desktop applications is joining the firm’s Klipfolio Dashboard product line to leverage the latter’s growing brand equity under the umbrella of Klipfolio, Inc.

Klipfolio Dashboard brings the value of scorecard and dashboard software to the desktop. Proven deployments with Fortune 1000 customers like Kroger, EMC, and Lufthansa demonstrate both business value and Klipfolio’s expertise in the enterprise performance management space.
“Klipfolio Dashboard gives us a real-time performance dashboard that improves data visibility for our key sales and financial metrics right on the desktop,” says Mark Meyer, Sales Manager, The Kroger Co. “Exposing these key performance metrics where they can’t be missed, when they are typically buried, has improved our performance significantly.”

Enterprises rely on Klipfolio Dashboard for different reasons. Where Helpdesk and Internal Communications teams can broadcast employee notifications and alerts straight to desktops across the organization, Sales, Marketing, and Operations departments use Klipfolio Dashboard to monitor and act on changing key performance indicators.

Klipfolio’s branded desktop application line of business, which boasts clients that include Intel, Staples and H&R Block, has also been re-launched on Klipfolio’s new web site. A dedicated sub domain at branded.klipfolio.com speaks directly to this market’s requirements. For more information on Klipfolio’s new statement of direction, please see http://www.klipfolio.com/.

About Klipfolio Inc.

Klipfolio develops Klipfolio Dashboard - the desktop dashboard for business - to help the Fortune 1000 increase the visibility of business information for faster, informed decisions that improve performance and profitability. Klipfolio Dashboard is the only enterprise dashboard that presents information directly on the desktop where it’s always visible, accessible, and actionable. Founded in 2001, Klipfolio is privately held and headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. Clients include Intel, Staples, EMC, and Lufthansa.

Contacts:
Klipfolio Inc.
US and Canada
1-877-233-6149

Klipfolio Inc.
Worldwide
1-613-233-6149
sales@klipfolio.com

Klipfolio Inc.
Allan Wille
1-613-233-6149
press@klipfolio.com
http://www.klipfolio.com

How prominent should alerts be on our business intelligence dashboards? One might be tempted to say right away that alerts and alarms should always be as big as possible. Well, keep in mind that digital dashboards are challenged to reflect the shades of grey that exist in the business and political environments in which they are built. We have to balance between the “Did you know?” advisories, the “Better check this out.” alarm, and the “OMG, shut down the reactor!” error alert.

Digital dashboards are small canvases that reflect the daily mayhem of our businesses. The more we jam onto that canvas, the harder it is to notice any one thing in particular. Will we notice little alert icons on our busy dashboards?

Does this mean we should put less on our dashboards? Recently, I’ve been installing apps on my iPhone and have noticed the very different approaches to using the screen space.

Here is a screenshot of a one-button application. The screen is literally filled with one big action button:

Imagine a big honking red alert icon that comes up on your dashboard when you need to stop what your’re doing and tend to an emergency situation. Too “big” for my taste, but you get the point.

Of course, we have to get into the business of parsing the subtleties behind various alert levels. For a humorous look at dashboard alerts, check out this video. Click on the image to go over to Dashboards.TV to see the video.

Isn’t that a great video?

Here is a good post about dashboard alerts from the smart folks at Juice Analytics:

Dashboard Alerts Checklist

Here are some icons for your use in creating “big” dashboard alerts.

Tags: Dashboard Alert icons

All software development projects demand high degrees of collaboration but Business Dashboards in particular span so many domains within an organization that strong group vision is an absolute must. Dashboards are so user-centric that without contribution by members of the various intended audiences during the design phase, the resulting software is an annoyance at best and useless at worst.

How best to manage the chaos that may come during the envisioning phase for a far-flung dashboarding project? I still say that we must start the requirements phase with some wide-open brainstorming sessions.

In this post, we’ll list some resources for conducting brainstorming session. Before getting to the various aides and suggestions, however, keep in mind that not all people brainstorm in the same manner. It’s our responsibilty to recognize this and facilitate what works best for each particular member of the team.

Here’s a favorite picture of mine. It’s a shot of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer doing some brainstorming. Steve is taking his typical charge-ahead approach. His hands are flying and his look intense. Bill is in thinking mode and has his eyes closed.

Brainstorming Ideas and Resources

• Five Brainstorming Tools in Microsoft Visio
• U.S. Army Brainstorming Session Guidelines
• Idea Generation Tools: Brainstorming, Affinity Grouping and Multivoting
• 7 Steps for Brainstorming
• Simple Steps for Classic Brainstorming
• Brainstorming Techniques Resource Center

Feel free to add to this list.

Another good way to brainstorm in terms of technology and business solutions is to look through vendor white papers. Try this multi-vendor business intelligence white paper collection.

Tags: Dashboard Design, Business Software Requirements Gathering, Brainstorming sessions for dashboards

Dashboard Spy sites: Dashboards by Example, Dashboards