I received an email from Hyperion today announcing a webcast entitled: “Scorecards vs Dashboards — When to Use Which?” The relationship between scorecards and dashboards suggested in this title is misleading. Scorecards and dashboards are entirely different animals, not two things that you choose between. The balanced scorecard, as defined by its inventors Kaplan and […]

Dashboards are designed to help us monitor what’s going on at a glance—or at least, that’s what they’re supposed to do. Unfortunately, any time a vendor combines more than one chart on a single screen, they call it a dashboard, no matter what its purpose, which creates a great deal of confusion. To give people […]

If you develop dashboards in Excel, a new company name BonaVista Systems has just made your life easier. They have just released an add-in for Excel, named MicroCharts, which makes it simple to create bullet graphs (my alternative to gauges and meters) and sparklines (Edward Tufte’s small, bare-bones time-series graphs). BonaVista Systems first came to […]

I returned last night from the midwest where I was working with some fine folks who recently started developing reports and their first dashboards using Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Portal. We spent most of a day investigating how well these tools will support their efforts to present information effectively. Until this week, I hadn’t seen […]