Turning on the map light: Towards some further enlightenment on Dashboards.

In Stephen Few’s book “Information Dashboard Design” he defines as “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” (copyright Stephen Few 2006. bolding is mine). In addition he advises the reader that “A dashboard is a type of display, a form of presentation, not a specific type of information or technology.” And he also categorizes them as noted in the following table. Dashboard Categories

Role	Strategic	Analytical	Operational
Type of data	Quantitative	Non-quantitative
Data domain	Sales	Finance	Marketing	Manufacturing	Human Resources	Development *	Personal *
Type of measures	Balanced Scorecard (e.g.: KPI’s)	Six Sigma	Non-Performance
Span of data	Enterprise	Departmental	Individual
Update frequency	Monthly	Weekly	Daily	Hourly	“Real time”
Interactivity	Static display	Interactive display
Mechanisms of display	Primarily graphical	Primarily textual	Mix of graphics and text
Portal functionality	Yes	No

* I added Development and Personal – Though we might find that Development doesn’t need a separate classification I do believe that Personal does.  Now I’m not purporting this to be the “be all end all” as far as explaining dashboards, and I don’t believe Mr. Few is either. But, I think this is a good start of a definition set for our purposes. (Though I’d be glad for any comments as to changes.) So let’s use this, till a better comes along, for any further explorations of dashboards. 

Some examples:.

1. I’ll start off with one of my favorites as far as a personal dashboard, the sample dashboard on the OpenLaszlo site.
2. Of course there’s a sample dashboard found at the Adobe Flex Developer Center.
3. Noetix has some samples of what they did for  Oracle and for Siebel
4. I’ll probably be lambasted if I don’t make mention of the dashboard including in Mac OS X.
5. The Dashboard Company has a plethora of examples.
6. And of course there’s always a lot too look at on Dashboard Spy.

This is in no way inclusive nor saying they are great examples of Dashboards. I’m just trying to get together a group to start with and use for understanding and analysis of dashboards, so that we can use them for any further discussions. 

Now let’s go back to the categories for a bit.  

What exactly does Strategic, Analytical and Operational mean in this perspective? I’m going to greatly oversimplify Mr Few’s explanation of these here and say the following. Strategic dashboards present an overview of information while Analytical presents a more in depth view for the purpose of further analysis. And I’ll briefly say that Operational Dashboards are designed to monitor operations. These are great oversimplifications and I’m we will go into more depth in later posts. But that will suffice for now as far as Roles.  

The Data Domain is relatively self-explanatory but I’d like to make a note or two as far as my additions. First off a good example of dashboards in the Development domain can be seen in many Bug (ahem excuse me *slaps my hand* Incident.) management software, both off the shelf and self-produced. Now as far as personal, this brings about a few interesting points in my mind. Where as most of the other dashboards need to be customized, these, I feel need to not only be customized but customizable. (A spotlight on some further discussions not only on dashboards to come: I personally feel that customizability is something that is highly needed in a lot of software. Everyone has differing preferences and different learning and working styles that suit them better. But that diatribe is for another day.) By customizable I mean the users should be allowed to make numerous changes as far as how the dashboard looks and feels and as far as the content. Two examples are provided above of personal dashboards; the OpenLazlo one and the Mac OS X Tiger one.   That’s all for now, the rest, I think, is for another day and another post. I hope this helped to get peoples brains thinking. And any feedback is, as always, more than welcome. 

Christopher