A 200 year old history of Business Dashboarding

The use of dashboards for visualizing a firm’s data has grown tremendously over the past few years. Some estimates put the data visualization market to be upwards of $5 Bn annually and growing steadily. The marketplace is full of big and small vendors providing everything from dashboarding platforms to dashboard design services. While today it is commonplace to see executives gazing intently over neat charts and graphs, this practice has had a long eventful evolution, which hitherto has not been understood clearly. Dashboards have indeed come a long way. Sit back, grab a latte and listen to the fascinating history of the business dashboard!

1840s – Horse Drawn Carriages

Originally, the word ‘dashboard’ applied to a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud or other debris "dashed up" (thrown up) by the horses' hooves.

The first horseless carriages were constructed in the late 19th century, with engines mounted beneath the driver. The simple dashboard was retained to protect occupants from debris thrown up by the cars' front wheels. Then around the turn of the century, Henry Ford started his iconic company which would forever change personal transportation, and also the dashboard’s utility!

1910s – Age of Cars

As car design evolved to position the motor in front of the driver, the dashboard became a panel that protected vehicle occupants from the heat and oil of the engine. This space was also used to place some gauges and controls, which later evolved into instrument panel. In its journey from a horse carriage to a car’s interiors, one key thing happened. The dashboard’s utility altered from one which offered protection to one which gave information.

The lone dashboard instrument in an early Model T Ford

The dashboards on earliest cars, if one thinks of the iconic Ford Model T, consisted solely of an ammeter. These dashboards kept adding more gauges over time, but the big leap arrived only with the advent of the cockpit of an advanced fighter plane. Here the utility changed – from displaying information to helping take decisions.

1940s - Advent of the cockpit

The world went into war and nations desperately vied for air superiority. Fighter plane design and functionality improved enormously. The need to cramp up all essential readings in and around the pilot gave rise to the cockpit, a concept which has evolved into today’s executive dashboards. As Frederick Teichmann wrote, in his 1942 Airplane Design Manual, “All control systems terminate in the cockpit; all operational and navigational instruments are located here; all decisions regarding the flight of the airplane are determined here.”

The car’s dashboard and fighter plane’s cockpit evolved but it would take half a century for the corporate world to take notice. Only in 1990, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, did the term dashboard come to denote a “screen giving a graphical summary of several types of information, typically used to give an overview of a business organization”. According to leading visualization expert Stephen Few, one invention precipitated this adoption. It was when Robert Kaplan and David Norton first designed a performance measurement framework called the ‘Balanced Scorecard’

1990s – Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard was a seminal invention. It gave executives a simple framework to devise, execute and monitor their business strategies. The concept of key performance indicators or KPIs firmly took root. But it also laid the seeds for a fundamental change – it introduced the visual element in corporate boardrooms and executive reviews. As teams huddled in workshops and drew out the scorecard, the value of visualizing things was clear.

The battle for executive attention or sponsorship had been won. But there was one singularly important event, as Stephen Few suggests, which firmly set the stage for dashboarding to proliferate. It was the Enron scandal.

2001 – The Enron Bankruptcy

On December 2, 2001, Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. With $63.4 billion in assets, this was the largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. Enron's stock fell from $90 (August 23, 2000) to $0.12 (January 11, 2002). As a result of the collapse, shareholders lost nearly $11 billion. This scandal brought to the fore urgent need for transparency in accounting and auditing, which further had the downstream effect of making data available for accurate & timely reporting.

The aftermath put new pressure on corporations to demonstrate their ability to closely monitor what was going on in their midst. This increased accountability, combined with the concurrent economic downturn, sent Chief Information Officers (CIOs) on a mission to find anything that could help managers at all levels more easily and efficiently keep an eye on performance. The marketplace soon offered a vast array of dashboard software from which to choose. And from amidst this crowded market, did emerge two small companies which would change the world of dashboarding.

2003 – Tableau and Qlik

In 2003, at Stanford, a Ph.D. candidate Chris Stolte was researching visualization techniques for exploring and analyzing relational databases & data cubes. His Ph.D. advisor Pat Hanrahan was also convinced this work could change the world. Together they invented a technology called VizQL. The duo joined hands with a Harvard alum Christian Chabot to commercialize their offering. They chose a French word meaning a frame of arts, photo, painting, graphics, panel as their company name. Thus, began Tableau.

The same year, a small Swedish origin company needed more capital and a broader vision to continue its growth. It was focused on BI and had grown to be 70 employees strong. The company succeeded in raising $12.5 Mn from Accel Partners & Jerusalem Venture Partners. This investment literally ‘Qliked’

Tableau and Qlik have been stupendous success. In FY16, Tableau raked in $826 Mn in revenues, a growth of 27% YoY. In June 2016 Qlik was bought by PE firm Thoma Bravo for a staggering $3Bn. But it wasn’t easy as the market was getting overcrowded with an explosion of Visualization vendors.

2007 – Acquisitions Galore

Most BI vendors that hadn't already started offering a dashboard product soon began to do so, sometimes by cleverly changing the name of an existing product, sometimes by quickly purchasing the rights to an existing product from a smaller vendor, and sometimes by cobbling together pieces of products that already existed. 2007 marked the entry of the traditional big boys with a flurry of big ticket acquisitions. IBM acquired Cognos, TIBCO acquired Spotfire, SAP took Business Objects and Oracle bought Hyperion. The business of dashboarding had finally entered mainstream and the years 2007 to 2011 saw a steady growth in corporate appetite. The next disruption was delivered by the emergence of big data and mobility. Dashboards were set for a complete overhaul

2010s – Big Data & Mobility

The two biggest technological advancements of the post 2010 era have been in areas of big data and mobility – both of which have significantly altered the dashboard functionalities as well. The dashboards of today can not only take in data from relational databases, but also talk to Hadoop and NoSQL databases for ingesting unstructured data. Many use cases have come up for real time dashboards which are powered by streaming data feeds. The UI has altered significantly as well, with busy on the go executives preferring to either view the dashboard on mobile devices or getting relevant alerts delivered on their devices. The concept of “dashboard comes to me with information which matters” has been gaining ground over the earlier “I go to the dashboard and look for information”

2020s – Crystal Gazing

A peek inside the crystal ball of business dashboards would reveal us a very exciting future. In the next ten years, business dashboarding looks all set to grow. The dashboards of the future could well move from 2d to three dimensions. No longer would you look at inanimate bars and trend lines on your screen. It is entirely possible an executive could walk in a room with three-dimensional projection of data, speak some commands and voila! Smart dashboards are also around the corner. Powered by artificial intelligence, dashboards could become really smart and learn from your past usages or current business contexts, thereby predicting in advance what information you may require at what time!

Horse drawn carriages to virtual reality, the 200-year old saga of the dashboard is nothing but fascinating. It is left to anyone’s imagination what the next 200 years will look like, and how this article would be rewritten in the year 2200!