Chapter 2. Overview of Dashboards and Silverlight

We see dashboards everywhere in our daily lives. Whether we are driving in our car, crossing the street, or shopping in a grocery store, we are inundated with dashboards. In the car, the dash informs us of our speed, gas level, oil pressure, etc. Crossing the street, we see street signs indicating street names and hear crosswalk indicators. In the grocery store, signs indicate where food groups are located and what is contained in certain aisles. All of these signs and indicators are great examples of providing information to the user at the right time.

Dashboards are part of a larger unit within technology named, Business Intelligence (BI). Business intelligence tries to sift through the wealth of data that resides in an organization and render it to the end user in the most appropriate medium possible. Reporting, spreadsheets, and OLAP cubes are some of the ways BI is accomplished within an organization. Dashboards typically are the first thing executives and managers see when they start work in the morning, and most likely the last thing they look at before leaving for the day. Providing good business intelligence is a very hard target to hit. It requires a coordinated effort across multiple departments and domains and can cause a lot of confusion. Good business intelligence can put an organization in a position where it can dominate in its demographic. What dashboards try to do is present pertinent information to the business user at the right moment and level as to where the business user can make actionable decisions based on that information. We stress the word information, because it is not just raw data that is being presented to the business. Many hours of investigation and discovery goes into identifying what is the correct level of information to be composed into the right dashboard element.