Cameron Haight

Recently I was having a discussion with a technology provider who in responding to some of my comments about their current user interface mentioned that a new dashboard capability would be in a future release.  Candidly, that didn’t get me too excited.  Why is it that here we are in 2008 and as a management industry are still using relatively primitive interface designs (especially when compared to some of the visualization techniques used in other areas such as scientific visualization)? 

Seemingly, we have not advanced that far from when I was a development manager in the mid-1990s.  I was part of a team tasked with developing a new product for BMC Software and we constructed something along the lines of a network topology map for the interface – a metaphor already made popular at the time with the early versions of HP’s OpenView product and an approach that is still obviously very common today.  Even in those "ancient" days though we were concerned about visual scalability with respect to the number of nodes that we might have had to depict.  Now fast forward a decade and stop and think about how we’ll adequately represent an environment that is not only rapidly growing in scale (especially if hosted virtual desktops really take off), but now we need to account for new attributes of objects such as movement and even perhaps a temporal aspect.  And we don’t just need to worry about the objects (virtual machines, etc.), but also their increasing number of interdependencies!  

It’s good to know that people such as noted performance and capacity planning expert Dr. Neil Gunther share similar concerns.  He’s actually suggested in many papers the use of what he calls barycentric coordinates to represent data such as that for performance management.  This paper, also referenced in Gunther’s work, takes a dim view of dashboards and suggests the use of treemap charts.  And here’s a presentation that describes many visualization methods to potentially enhance computer network defense.  I book marked this site long ago because I’m always on the prowl for new ways to depict information in my presentations – much to the potential chagrin of Edward Tufte.  At the very least, can we at least have a little more fun when having to perform tedious administrative tasks?

Will we come up with a better way to represent large volumes of management-related information?  I don’t know … but I think we are getting closer to the point where we’d better start if we hope to more effectively manage not only today’s growing virtual server-like environments, but the potential cloud computing world as well. 

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