From strategy to execution, organizations navigate their respective markets carefully as they compete for market share and revenue. Boat racing faces similar challenges for executing against strategy as I learned during a development project for the 2009 SAP 505 World Championships. For this race, I assisted with the development of a race strategy/execution dashboard that couples business intelligence dashboard technology with sailing technology and domain knowledge. The resulting collaborative effort led to the development of an innovative dashboard.

This Xcelsius dashboard features two modes: strategy and race (execution). Strategic planning requires cultivation of information from many different sources. While data retrieval presents unique challenges, mashing it together in one visual compilation is another. For this particular dashboard, vendors and domain experts collaborated to produce powerful results in an extremely short period of time.

To plan either business or race strategy, you need to predict conditions and then plot a course of action. Based on date/time inputs and wind prediction inputs, the dashboard retrieves data from Local Knowledge software to plot ocean currents (yellow lines). The strength and direction of the current is visualized in a visual grid within the Google Map. Upwind laylines (red dots) are controlled by current, wind, and a profile based on the 505 boats. Local Knowledge software does all of the heavy lifting and returns laylines and currents through a custom web service.

Monitoring execution is the second challenge not easily achieved as conditions change. While the strategy tab relies on user input for wind conditions and a starting point, which ultimately affects the course itself, the race tab presents real-time views of this information . Real time GPS locations of all boats and marks (marks shown as red pins) are provided via Trac-Trac. On the fly, the dashboard retrieves laylines and routes based on real time information including wind conditions. Trac-Trac also provides additional information for each boat including boat direction and position.

All of this information is fed through Xcelsius into Centigon Solutions GMaps Plugin, which was extended to meet the challenges of this project.

A public facing version of this dashboard is available for you to viewing at: http://explorer.sap.com/505/ and during the event, will include real-time commentary feed by renowned sailing expert Kimball Livingston.

As a huge college basketball fan, more specifically a die-hard Duke fan, I recently got into a heated debate about what school has the most top draft picks. So of course that sparked an interesting dashboard idea, with the NBA finals and upcoming NBA draft this month.

The result is an Xcelsius dashboard with all of the NBA Draft Lottery picks since 1985. My goal was to enable dynamic analysis of any date range for the top X draft picks. Whether analyzing top 5 draft picks or top 10 picks, I wanted to dynamically see what colleges produced the top number of draft picks.

At the same time, you can click on any team or college within the bar chart to see the individual players who were drafted.

To build this dashboard, I used a combination of a few workarounds and Centigon Solutions plugin components including Filtered Summary, Dynamic Sort, and Background Builder. Without these components, this particular dashboard would have been near impossible.

I am going to provide the source files for this particular dashboard and do a few articles about specific workarounds, so you can learn a few new tricks of the trade while having the opportunity to use add-on components to build this type of analysis.

View Dashboard

Filtered Summary
Used to dynamically count the number of players drafted to NBA teams, Filtered Summary provides a critical calculation layer to drive the analysis as you increase or decrease the number of years or draft numbers. Rather than relying on cumbersome, performance hindering logic, Filtered Summary continuously evaluates every player drafted from 1985 and then generates a summary table that is visualized in a bar chart.

Dynamic Sort
When Filtered Summary generates a dynamic count for each NBA team or College for where players are drafted, dynamic sort will automatically re-sort the data in place so the graph can visually represent the number of players in a descending order. With 2 simple properties, you can enable sorting and ranking with no impact to performance and no Excel logic.

Background Builder
To create a professional looking user interface, Background Builder was utilized to enclose all components into a single dashboard. With un-intrusive gradients and textures background builder can create a wide range of graphical styles. In the NBA dashboard background builder was combined with a brown color scheme aligned to basketball. With a few clicks of the mouse, you can easily re-configure background builder to a less flashy color scheme.

Here is a dashboard that I created this morning after flipping through the channels dominated by Swine Flu news. Plotted in the Google Map is a visual representation of the number of cases confirmed by the CDC in each city. This data is refreshed as the CDC website is updated along with an up to the minute RSS feed.

Update:5/7- CDC moved the swine flu page again so I updated it with a new zoom feature.

As the gas prices at the pump increase, I wanted to see just how much we are paying for gas here in California compared to the rest of the country. To do this, I utilized Xcelsius 2008 to build a dashboard not only to help make information easier to consume, but also to showcase a sample/viral dashboard for my blog.

The resulting dashoard exemplifies the benefits of using interactive data visualization compared to static HTML tables/reports. At a glance, I can quickly assess what I am paying at the pump in relation to the national average and state averages.

Just showing the data wasn’t good enough…I wanted to provide additional analysis to transform the $/gallon data into something meaningful. A simple calculator was added to illustrate what we will pay per month and year, given the current price.

View full size example

All data for this dashboard originates from AAA.com. I am not providing source files for this dashboard at this time, but if you have any questions about what I have done, please add them to the comments in this post. If you are interested in using this dashboard in your web site for non-profit, please contact me.

I have several people point out that the gauges are distracting, which is absolutely correct. I have reverted back to the original graph version that can be viewed here:
View Gas Price Dashboard v0.9