Dashboard

A Dashboard is a central location where users can view and often interact with various reports and controls that indicate the overall health of an entity. In terms of Business Intelligence, the entity in question is an organization and the dashboard is often referred to as an 'Executive Dashboard' or a 'Digital Dashboard'. It is a point of integration for multiple reports, scorecards and key performance indicators.

Contents

• Dashboard Basics
• Business Intelligence Dashboards
• See Also Additional Information
• Sources and further reading

Dashboard Basics

Dashboards may be a relatively new term in Information Technology, but they have existed as tangible objects for quite some time now. One of their most obvious uses is in your everyday automobile. The 'dash' of a car is intended to provide the driver with all of the information needed to understand the current condition of the vehicle. It provides all the vital signs in one central location. Can you imagine if you had to check the oil under the hood or look into the gas tank every time you need to know how much was left?



The individual items on the dashboard are commonly referred to as widgets. In the image above, there are several widgets including a speedometer, a fuel gauge, a temperature gauge, and many others. Even the stereo contains widgets that allow the user to see what station the radio is tuned into and what volume has been set.

Some widgets are static, meaning that the user cannot adjust any of their settings, while others are interactive. The fuel gauge is an example of a static widget. The user cannot do anything (aside from stop at a gas station) to change the reading of that widget. The volume control on the otherhand is interactive, allowing the user to adjust its level at any time.

Business Intelligence Dashboards

BI Dashboards are intended to provide an audience with the information necessary to assess the overall health of a business organization or unit. Because audiences differ, it is common for an organization to have several dashboards, each one targeted at a different department or job function. For example, the IT Helpdesk department may have a dashboard that shows the following information:

• The number of trouble tickets currently open
• Key Performance Indicators that display the current hard drive status of all servers IT is responsible for. A red light may indicate the server is almost out of space
• Line chart showing the trend in cpu usage for high-demand servers
• An alert image that only appears when two users have created a deadlock by accessing the same resource at the same time

While the dashboard for the Sales department may include these metrics:

• The five products that produced the highest sales so far that month
• The five products that experienced the most returns so far that month
• Line charts showing total sales trends
• Key Performance Indicators illustrating the status for all sales representatives for the day (have they met their quota....)

The widgets placed on a BI Dashboard are generally displayed graphically in the form of a chart, a series of icons, or a set of images. This allows a user to quickly make an assessment of vital signs without the need to read through various tables and numbers. Following simple logic such as green values mean 'good' and red means 'trouble' allows executives to spend a minimal amount of time in the assessment stage, and focus on keeping everything green.

Interaction is an important factor for BI Dashboards as well. Some interaction may happen behind the scenes. For example a dashboard might be personalized to display different information based on the login id of a user. Using this method, a Sales Dashboard could be configured to only display the sales in the region where the current user resides.

Other interaction is more obvious and may prompt the user to enter parameters or present them with options to obtain more information for various widgets. An example of this is seen in the figure below. This is a sample dashboard created in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Notice in the upper left corner there is an area provided where the user can select a particular Account Representative. Applying this filter will limit the data in all of the charts shown to include only information for that specific individual.

There are also several actions the user can take, located on the blue toolbars above each chart. The user could click 'Open' to open the entire spreadsheet to see the data that contributes to the resulting charts, or they can click 'Update' to refresh the data that has been pulled from a database server.

See Also:

Business Intelligence
Key Performance Indicators
Balanced Scorecard
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Sources and further reading:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dashboard
• http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=214755

The core of this entry was written by:
Ann Wallinger
Solutions Architect
Susquehanna Technologies
e: annw@susqtech.com