Where Did Dashboard Reporting Come From?

Historically, business intelligence (BI) tools were designed for data specialists who would build customized reports using a complicated UI. These specialists generally had PhDs in data science, and they needed that kind of training to discern the information that their systems were spitting back out at them. At the time, BI had no dashboards, so data came in the form of a spreadsheet, and the data scientist had to draw correlations and conclusions from columns of numbers. Then, the specialists would build and compile individual reports.

Thanks to cloud and advances in technology, the concept of dashboard emerged. People realized that it’s important to have all pertinent business data in one place. That way, you can see the context of your data and track multiple KPIs next to each other. Finally, there was a visual way to consume and interpret data and make better decisions. Using dashboards, even those of us who aren’t data scientists could understand our businesses better.

How Dashboards Evolved

In the early days of dashboards, however, you still had to build your BI environment by yourself. Reporting tools like key performance indicators (KPIs) had to be constructed by the data scientist before they were put in the dashboard. So dashboarding was either a module or an add-on.

Today, dashboarding has become much easier. Although some BI solutions are still siloed, the newest wave of solutions lets you build, edit and move dashboards around with the same ease that you can move around, say, PowerPoint or Keynote slides. Still, not all dashboards are created equal.

What to Look For in Dashboard Reporting

In order to make sure you choose the right dashboard, you should look for three things:

1. Context on one screen

In traditional BI solutions, you have to navigate to another screen to build your reports before placing them on a dashboard. These separate environments create a psychological divide that makes it more difficult for users to orient themselves in the dashboard and understand the data models they’re building. If you create your report in a separate page, it’s hard to imagine what a chart will look like when it’s finished and put on a dashboard next to other charts, tables or images.

The trick is to find a solution that lets you have all of your context in one place. You’re never forced to go anywhere else. Everything is integrated and in one location. There is no divide between the dashboard and data analysis. Because you know where everything is at all times, your data doesn’t live in a vacuum. You can even find new insights by seeing charts side-by-side, and moving them around.

2. The ability to move things around

Building and moving KPIs around on your dashboard should be as easy as it is to do things on a mobile device—swipe, zoom, shrink, click on a dialog box to see something in detail. That way, you can still have your context all around your actions, so you don’t get lost in your data or confused by what you’re seeing. You can position everything perfectly, adjust the layers of your dashboard and edit it, without losing your context or the clean look and feel of your dashboard’s design.

3. Get information when, where and how you need it

In today’s real-time business environment, daily or weekly updates don’t cut the butter anymore. You should be able to get updates on demand, when and where you need them. Your mobile device should also be able to push you notifications — informing you that you just received a much-anticipated email, for example—to further simplify your decision-making. Your BI should be waiting on you, not the opposite.

To learn more about dashboards, visit our What is a Dashboard blog.
Request a demo to see how GoodData’s dashboards can provide an integrated view into your business performance to help you make faster, better decisions.

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By using a dashboard, you can more easily process the meaning of the information your BI system is giving you, and make better decisions as a result. Everyone from the CEO to middle managers can use dashboards to see information when they need it. As a result, these workers can make changes in real time, rather than using guesswork or monthly reports.

As the above image shows, dashboards and other visual BI features should all fit onto one computer screen. You see all the most important graphics in one place, and you can drill further into any visual on the dashboard as needed. That means clicking on the visual and changing your date ranges, reduce the number of data points or hone in on certain categories, like a product or team. That way, you can find out why, for example, a business unit is performing as it is.

Benefits of a Dashboard

There are zettabytes of data in the world today, and companies are drowning in information. A dashboard places the data the companies need in a visual, easy-to-understand format. The ability to see the data that you need, when you need it, gives you the ability to quickly understand your company’s situation at any given point in time. Rather than digging through emails and Excel spreadsheet, you can consult your dashboard for a quick insight.

A dashboard democratizes access to big data, so that anyone in any department can have the right information at their fingertips. It removes the need for a specialized data scientist for every simple question. Dashboards are an important tool not only for internal company operations, but for communicating with clients. We’ve heard time and again that dashboards have saved our clients hours in terms of compiling reports and sharing information.

Types of Dashboards

Dashboards are customizable depending on your type of industry and unique needs. The range of customization goes from the appearance of the dashboard [are pure graphics best or do you prefer spreadsheet-like reports] to the type of data on display. A retailer might choose to display daily sales by country on their dashboard, for instance, while an IT service provider might gauge network speed and customer complaints. Specifically, dashboards can be customized in several ways, all of which can work together to best suit your organization:

1. By decision-making horizon

A strategic dashboard provides a general overview of how an organization is performing. It depicts overarching, longer-term trends, such as sales so far this quarter, ongoing costs, etc. You can use the strategic dashboard to gauge the health of your overall company and ensure that you don’t have any leaks in your bucket, so to speak. In general, strategic dashboards are used for quarterly assessments.

A tactical dashboard is used to analyze trends in your business. It’s common to look for trends over time, for example, did you sell as many widgets this month as you did last month? What about the same month a year ago? Tactical dashboards center on historical data, giving an overview that enables you to discover important trends.

An operational dashboard helps a company optimize its operations. Used for customer- and partner-facing activities, operational dashboards provide information to company representatives that they can use to interact and transact more effectively. For example, an operational dashboard will show a customer service rep a caller’s payment history, contact information, troubleshooting history and any other records of interest.

You can use an operational  dashboard for real-time, ongoing information, so that you can make immediate decisions. For example, you can see the health of your call center—how many lines are open, average wait times—on a second-by-second basis, so that you can address emergencies or bottlenecks as needed. This type of real-time dashboard is also ideal for generating ‘push’ notifications on your mobile device. If your BI platform notices that you happen to be eating lunch near a sales prospect, your phone can notify you of the opportunity in real time.

2. By function

You can have a dashboard that is specifically designed for sales, marketing, customer engagement or customer support. In these dashboards, you can set goals and milestones, as well as competitive information, and gauge your progress over time.

3. By type of analysis

There are three main types of analysis that a dashboard provides: reporting, analytics and ad-hoc. Dashboard reporting refers to the general metrics that appear on the dashboard—the charts, tables, graphs, etc. It tells you the what is being reported on, such as sales quotas, and the numbers associated with that item.

Analytic reporting goes deeper. To extend the sales quota example: What did your top performers do to exceed their quotas, and why haven’t your bottom performers been improving? Analytics are where the insights live. You can find the specific sources, no matter how granular, of your problems. Then you can adjust your dashboard, perhaps by setting new milestones, and try out a new strategy to see how that works.

An ad-hoc dashboard is what you get when you want to do a customized analysis that doesn’t come in your pre-packaged analytics. In ad-hoc analysis, you put in custom metrics (how many dog-owner salespeople do I have, and are the dogs the reason they’re performing better?) It is a customized dashboard that offers you flexibility in terms of how you analyze data. The downside is that different users may customize an ad-hoc dashboard in different ways, gaining different answers to the same question.

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Yesterday, I nearly drowned in a sea of extraneous data. In just one hour during an important conference call, my laptop overflowed with 300 e-mails from an email thread I frankly didn’t care about. Imagine how much time I could have saved if my system knew I was unavailable, and sent me only the two notifications I truly needed: That the customer I was on the call with owed us an invoice, and that my next appointment was delayed by half an hour.

Clearly, enterprise users need an easy and intuitive way to parse all their data into a useful context. Just as clearly, they also need to have the right information delivered to them at the right time, on the right device. These days, that device is likely to be mobile — be it laptop, smartphone or tablet — as sales of desktop computers erode and enterprises increasingly accommodate tablets in the workplace..

I say it’s time for big data to play a starring role on the small screen — the small screen of mobile devices, that is. Businesses primarily view big data as collecting and storing zetabytes of data from diverse sources for eventual business analysis. But in today’s connected and mobile world, decision-makers can’t wait for “eventual.” They need big data apps that intelligently gather and analyze data as it comes in from other apps on their device (your calendar and sales management apps, for instance).  Think of the ramifications: big data apps could suggest different ways to improve sales or — dare I say it — know not to send me thousands of emails on topics I don’t care about when my calendar shows I’m in a meeting.

Such contextual real-time analytics can be extended across any number of roles and tasks: A sales rep driving to one meeting could be alerted that a good prospect two blocks away wants to meet. A Chief Marketing Officer could see which social media campaigns deliver the best return on investment.  Or an inventory manager could know which store just sold out of fashion’s “It” purse and needs immediate replenishment. These are just examples. The convergence of big data and enterprise mobile apps means that anyone, anywhere, can glean the insight she needs to make better, faster decisions.

Think Like a Consumer

The key is in the design. Developers building mobile apps for the enterprise need to combine the ease of use of consumer apps with enterprise-class security and data-collection technologies. And they need to optimize their apps for each device’s small screen.

Consider Intuit’s Mint, which organizes and analyzes consumers’ finances. The company’s desktop, tablet and smartphone apps are all designed to maximize both screen real estate and context. On the desktop app, you can manage and sort your finances in full detail. Mint’s tablet app is smaller and more limited, enabling you to see a list of accounts, but not interact with them in the same depth. Its smartphone app focuses on notifications. Imagine how much could get done if businesses designed their big data apps this way.

In healthcare, for example, doctors making bedside rounds could tap into mountains of clinical research to discover the optimum treatments for their patients — and they could see the results as instantly intuitive charts or as scrollable lists (similar to the iPhone’s email app) depending on whether they’re carrying tablets or smartphones.

In IT, big data apps could predict cyber-attacks and send alerts, show scenarios and recommend actions depending on which mobile device technologists are carrying.

These are just examples, but I firmly believe that big data will soon permeate every aspect of business. I also believe that the convergence of contextual, real-time, data with mobile devices makes everyone and everything smarter. When you look at it that way, the small screen becomes huge.

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Apple, post-Jobs, is still the king of the market. Jobs left a template that current Apple leaders can follow for hopefully many years to come. But Jobs’ influence doesn’t end there. It extends into the innovation environment in all of Silicon Valley. App developers, mobile platform providers, UI designers and anyone else focused on a good user experience has been influenced by Apple’s user-oriented standards in some way.

Jobs’ focus on user design became a founding principle for GoodData – we made it our mission  to turn an archaic, complex business function — business intelligence (BI) — into something that people love to use. GoodData’s new Bashes, similar to the concept of Apple’s apps, use the cloud and an open platform to make BI accessible to everyone. We’ve opened up a field formerly relegated to PhDs and IT experts to everyone, truly democratizing data and offering deep business insights.

We maintain a firm belief that Bashes are the most user-friendly BI tools ever invented, and, in some ways, we have Steve Jobs to thank. He laid the groundwork for what user experience should be like, which is now (finally) being extended to the enterprise. Jobs may have passed on physically, but his legacy of positive, productive and user-friendly computing is more alive than ever. And here at GoodData, we try to live by it every day.

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Want some good news? These authors are lamenting a problem that GoodData is solving.

GoodData’s Director of Product Management, Hubert Palan, shares his thoughts on the use and performance of BI dashboards. In his opinion, dashboards are a thing of the past. In the new world, it’s all about UX:

“There’s no doubt that the era of static dashboards is over and that interactive visual UXs—a significant upgrade—are taking their place. In his original post, Mark Smith makes a strong point: getting stuck with basic interactive dashboards, having limited interactions and making charts aesthetically pleasing does not solve the larger issue at hand. He also highlights the next wave of action-oriented analytics and visual discovery, a trend that everybody who wants to be successful in BI should follow.

I would like to take it one step further: having a smart UX that draws your attention to what is important in the moment is something that we have heard about for quite some time. We are starting to see this concept permeate a new breed of products, with GoodData leading the charge in a fundamentally different way.

GoodData believes the solution lies in addressing the gap between generic analytics and specific business use cases. Generic BI tools give you a wide range of data visualization and exploration features, but they lack the most important ingredient: the business logic that is relevant for specific business use cases. This important information is what helps the user get the answers they need for specific use cases using the best data visualizations.”

So, while we all agree that traditional BI dashboards fail to meet the needs of today’s businesses, GoodData’s use-case-oriented UX set a new benchmark for the industry. Designed to connect business people with their relevant data, GoodData’s UXs provide mission-critical insight and plenty of reasons to love them.

The post A Response to “3 Reasons to Hate Dashboards” appeared first on GoodData.

GoodData has allowed you to position, pixel-perfectly, any object on the dashboard including external content for quite some time and we’re now making dashboards building even easier. Like in Powerpoint or Keynote, you can select multiple objects and move them around freely, copy/paste them (even among multiple tabs) or just delete them. And not just that, you can also arrange the objects in layers and move them to the front or to the back. All that via simple controls or keyboard shortcuts too.

We thought this was pretty cool, but still wasn’t enough. We wanted to give you even more flexibility and better tools to unleash your creativity and so from now on you can make chart background transparent which allows you to overlay the charts over each other, put graphical elements underneath or combine the charts with headline reports in a tight space (see the above graphic).

Going forward we’ll be allowing more customization including:

• Transparent background for the rich iframe web content
• Customized color pallet and fonts
• The flexibility to turn off Report Titles
• Text alignment
• More built-in shapes

We’re already hearing from our passionate users who are adding background visualizations to highlight areas in charts or combining charts with micro charts and want to hear from you too.  In the comment section below, tell us what dashboards you will be able to come up with thanks to these new features.

So once again welcome to the world of the most beautiful dashboards – welcome to the world of GoodData.

The post Release 73: Building Project Simplicity appeared first on GoodData.

In this example, we will setup a drill path that drills across to a Rep Scorecard report that indicated which rep has the highest win rate.

Step One:  Within your dashboard, click on the  ”Edit”  icon.

Step Two: Click on the report wheel icon located on the top right.

Step Three: Select a metric (Won) and select the report we want create the drill path. Click “Apply.”

Step Four: Click on any of the bars in the chart that represent the metric we selected.

In Release 71, GoodData improved the core database technologies, which will bring about significant improvements in report computation and data loading performance.  Happy reporting!

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“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
- reads the sign in Albert Einstein’s office at Princeton.

Early in my career, I worked in the art department of a newspaper and was lucky enough to be mentored in the art of creating effective charts. The main goal was to ensure the chart type chosen was effective in communicating the data, not obscuring it, and to ensure the reader could see the “story” of the data quickly. The same rules apply in creating dashboards.

I had the good fortune to work with GoodData very recently. This company helps convert big data into profitable insights and strategies for business executives by offering a disruptive cloud-based enterprise business intelligence platform. We collaborated to show how effective investigation and counsel when envisioning a dashboard will give the executive more actionable information. In newspaper vernacular, it tells a story.

For example, in a request for a dashboard to show the volume of Support Calls within a group, a basic chart would look like this (see the chart on the left).

At first glance, it looks like Janice is not working up to par with her colleagues. However, let’s look at the same information in a different way (see chart on the right). Notice that instead of a single color bar chart, it is now a stacked, colored bar chart. A time element was also introduced. The stacked bar chart quickly shows that a major product issue cropped up this week. And in fact Janice is not avoiding work. She doesn’t work on product calls, but her colleagues do. There is an issue that must be dealt with by management.

This illustration shows how by not choosing the proper report attributes and chart type, you can obscure the information that would be most meaningful and actionable to you, your staff and the business. Below are 5 best practices we at Bluewolf and GoodData counsel when we approach dashboard creation.

1. Understand what attribute dimensions are most appropriate for your business or role, and which chart types will best visualize those dimensions.
2. The best charts show comparative data. This can be historical, year over year, month over month, groupings or date progressions.
3. Dashboards should be organized so that trends and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) stand out and are easily identifiable. The top left chart is usually the chart most people look at first in countries where written languages are left to right. Choose this chart carefully. Also, think about what charts will be seen when the dashboard is first clicked on. The most important charts should be seen in that first screen.
4. Too many colors in a chart will be overwhelming to the reader and will occlude the message. Try another grouping instead. Keep background colors to a minimum.
5. Titles should be descriptive and any assumptions clearly explained. Attribute filters, such as date ranges or territories, should be applied at the dashboard level rather than individual report level whenever possible.

Albert Einstein had good reason to like the quote above. Data can be misleading, and you don’t want to be led to the wrong conclusions.

The post Guest Post: Get The Real Story From Your Dashboards appeared first on GoodData.

• Bullet – Thermo Charts
• Dashboard Tab Export
• Chart Label Visual Enhancement
• Data Collaboration Improvements

Bullet – Thermo Chart
This new chart type allows users to easily visualize the current performance versus the targets. Users can define different degrees of performance, such as less satisfactory to most satisfactory. Take a look at how to create a Bullet-Thermo chart.

Dashboard Tab Export Users can export a complete dashboard tab to PDF, making physical distribution of your dashboards a breeze.

Chart Label Visual Enhancement
See more labels alongside your charts than before. We are going green and using the screen space wisely.

Data Collaboration Improvement
Regardless of a users invitation status, recipients have access to the “Invite Users” button the Project & Users page within the GoodData project page.

The post New Dashboard and Reporting Features appeared first on GoodData.

Data needs to make sense, and knowing the difference between a report and dashboard—and when each should be used—can help you organize your data in a way that is both comprehensible and accessible. While reports and dashboards are both capable of turning collected data into useful information, they drastically differ in function and usability.

Reports are a traditional way of summarizing data. Providing information based on detailed data generated from a specific search, reports tend to be detailed and complex in nature. And while they may include some visual components—such as graphs or charts—they are typically text-heavy and designed to be displayed as a document or printed for distribution.

Dashboards, on the other hand, are much more interactive in the way data is presented. Relying on visual indicators to display an array of information—which often include condensed reports—dashboards allow online user participation to create a simple, easily accessible interface that can be accessed by virtually anyone anywhere.

Dashboards display only the most vital information gathered from a given data set. And while they may not be as detailed as reports, dashboards can provide quick answers to those big questions from just one glance.

Where to begin? Create simple dashboards tailored to fit the goals within your organization, use proper visual design and layouts, as well as functional tools that allow viewers to interact with nearly every feature on the page.

The goal is to bring your company performance to life on a single screen. In the words of data visualization guru, Stephen Few, “Most information dashboards that are used in business today fall far short of their potential.  The root of the problem is not technology – at least not primarily – but poor visual design.  To serve their purpose and fulfill their potential, dashboards must display a dense array of information in a small amount of space in a manner that communicates clearly and immediately.” ¹

But even with the introduction of progressive technologies like dashboards, reporting still plays an important role in delivering useful information. Knowing who your audience is and what kind of information you’re looking for helps you determine when to use a report and when to use a dashboard so you can successfully measure your company performance and drive your business forward.

Is your company using the proper visual design and layouts to effectively deliver data?

[1] Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data

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