6.2.15

The Elusive Executive Dashboard

Some things you should never, ever, EVER google.

Assless chaps is one and the other is Executive Dashboards.

Both searches may start out innocent enough, but will make you want to tear your eyes out. An Assless chaps search will at least give you a giggle, if not haunt your nightmares for years.

But an Executive Dashboard search will leave you exhausted and diminish your will to live. If you're analyst anyway.

You'll realize that in 2015, at least 20 years into the BI movement, and there's still little in the way of good dashboarding out there and that is the reason why you are always being asked to replicate the crap. Pardon my language, but it's sooooo frustrating. <big whine there>

Since I love to share my misery, let's play Where's Waldo with this search. How many crap dashboards do you have to search through until you find a good one?

Here's the first 9 dashboards. See any non-crap?


































Nope. Not Yet.


































More crap.


































That's 27 dashboards and still not one good one.
Nope.
We've now gone through 45 crap dashboards.
Still nothing.




Wait. Did you see it!!! Please tell me you saw it. It's number 57 in the upper right corner. It's a Stephen Few style dashboard. We hit the jackpot here because there's also a Juice Analytics dashboard in the middle. These guys know what they're doing.

Now search Dashboard Design Templates and you'll get a lot of this. These are web-site templates built by graphic designers. They look cool and there's some good design elements here, but there's a lot that's wrong and just won't work in the business world with real data. And they're awfully fond of pies and donuts and color that doesn't signal anything other than "Look at me! I'm pink!".














BTW: I don't recommend you forward this post to your boss. It will likely be interpreted as a passive-aggressive means of telling him/her that you think their dashboard ideas are crap.