Part 2: What do we want to accomplish?

We first need to decide exactly what we want to accomplish with our dashboard. There are certain metrics we want to see.

Sales:

• Dollar amount of product shipped this month – This helps us know how we are doing for the month and how efficient production is
• Dollar amount of product in the production queue – This combined with the metric above lets us see show sales is doing for the month and if production is behind.
• Year to date sales – See how we have done so far this year.
• Projected sales for the year – We will be able to see if we are on track for a annual sales goal.
• Sales graph – A history of the sales and the trend.

Support:

• Support queue – Number of new cases that need to be dealt with.
• Open cases – Number of cases that are waiting on an action (either by us or the customer).
• Training calendar – Who we are training and when.

Development:

• Current releases – The current shipping releases of the software.
• Snippets – These are one or two sentences of what the development staff is working on. They are mandatory for each member of the devel team to do every week. We just email what we are working on to the snippets server.

Company:

• Profitability index – This is a percentage. The formula is: 1 – (sales / expense)  I’m sure this is called something else, but it is what I though up as a measure of the state of finances of the company.
• Debt deviation – One of our 2008 goals is to be a debt free company. The dollar amount we are in debt is not as important as the deviation from last months debt. This is a percentage.
• Company blog – These are the press releases and announcements from the company.

Now that we know what we want to see, we need to figure out how to do it. We, of course, will be using Carousel to display the information.

The critical part of this dashboard is that I want it to be as automated as possible. It needs to get data dynamically from our other systems. We will need to get the data into a format for Carousel to read. Carousel has two main way of getting data in, RSS and it’s RDA XML interface. We will use RSS mostly, but I will also use the RDA to show how it works.