Executive Dashboards

Back in the day, it was the keys to the executive washroom that signaled you had made it. These days, you'll need the keys to the executive dashboard to reach that inner circle. Executive dashboards are highly visual applications that provide an instant report on an organization's health. Because they rely on graphical representations--rather than columns and rows of numbers--executive dashboards allow the top brass to grok their business intelligence reports, with just a glance ...

Executive dashboards tap real-time data as they use data visualization techniques to bring those databases to life. A typical installation can include, bar, pie, bubble, and stock charts, as well as line and radar graphs. While some visualizations may be strictly executive material, other charts and graphs can be shared with a wider audience, via an enterprise portal.

Executive dashboard developers include Acutate, BEA Systems, Corda, iDashboards, Infommersion, Sherrill-Lubinski, UniFact, Visual Mining, and others.

The Corda website features a number of executive dashboard demo apps.

Corda's retail executive dashboard, for example, shows store revenues, claims/returns, and customer location for Federal Superstores. On the store revenue screen, you can instantly see the total revenues by state, the store average by state, the top five revenue stores nationwide, and the bottom five revenue stores nationwide. The executive dashboard shows state revenues on a color coded map, while the top and bottom five stores are shown with bar graphs. When you mousing over each state, that state's revenue pops up. Click on a state and you can drill down into a weekly revenue analysis by city. Click on a city, and the dashboard will show you a revenue breakdown by department.

Executive dashboards are not to be confused with Starfish Software's Dashboard for Windows 95--a nifty and dearly departed launchpad utility. Why does that sound familiar? Starfish was founded in 1994 by Philippe Kahn, of Borland fame. (The company was acquired by Motorola in 1998, before being acquired again by Pumatech in early 2003.) Looking back, it appears that Dashboard for Windows cracked sometime before the Motorola acquisition.