It seems like wherever I go on my engagements, my clients are really excited about the fact that they are going to be able to use a “state of the art” dashboard development tool. Typically, an engagement starts out with what is called “knowledge transfer”, which basically means that I show the clients a number [...]

Whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, I begin my response with “I work at a company called iDashboards”. Like clockwork, the canned response is always, “oh like dashboards for a car.” Of course this is not the case. But then again, what the IT world refers to as dashboards and what [...]

Did you know that charts and dashboards can be exported from one installation of iDashboards (called the source installation) and imported into another installation of iDashboards (called the target installation)? Charts and dashboards are exported to an iDashboards archive file (named with the .idbar extension). This file is then used to import the charts and [...]

Hello, loyal readers. If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you know that successful dashboard projects must be planned carefully. If you need a refresher, our dashboard storyboarding article explains how to define the What, Who, and When for each metric or chart. There is another important question that I like to ask [...]

Over the holidays and into the New Year, my son and I played a silly game around the house. We took up the nonsense of talking like the people on an infomercial. We took common, everyday conversation and added exaggerated, boisterous, phrases where we sold each other items around the house for ridiculous prices. One [...]

You are Thinking Big and you want a dashboard. Are you looking for a way to tame Big Data? Do you just like really Big Charts? If you are not asking the right questions, you could end up with a Big Problem. When designing your dashboard it is extremely important to think about the Big [...]

I have been working in the business intelligence field for about 6 months now and whenever I am at a client site the words “smart impact” come to my mind. These two words are actually acronyms used in the book “Enterprise Dashboards: Design and Best Practices for IT” by Shadan Malik. Even if someone has [...]

It is important to design a dashboard that is useful and conveys vital information, without overwhelming your users.  One technique for managing a mountain of data is the use of drilldowns.  A drilldown presents data to a user in bite-sized portions, instead of sitting them at the buffet table.  Rather than drowning in a sea [...]

An alarming trend in the dashboarding world is a tragedy that is easily avoided. Every day, users are creating dashboards that are tragically ugly. This ranges from things like using charts not suited for the data to horrendous color choices. It may be best to consult with your Marketing team about what company-approved colors will [...]

*Three talents are highly recommended: Data, Design and Business. The qualifications for being able to build a dashboard vary; depending on how deep visual KPIs are going to penetrate your business. I’ve seen a variety of students with varying talents learn iDashboards. The most successful students have knowledge in three areas: Data, Design and Business. [...]