When you get into a car as a driver you put the key in the ignition (or press a button) and the dashboard lights up. Most of the time the car will go through its start-up checks showing you a set of icons that eventually go off and tell you that it’s OK to get going. Once in motion the dials on the dashboard will show you various pieces of information about the car.
(Ever wondered why it’s called a dashboard? The name goes all the way back to horse-drawn carriages where the dash-board was in the same place as the modern dashboard to stop the driver and passengers from getting covered in material “dashed-up” from the horses hoof)
People have, for some time now, taken the dashboard analogy and applied it to business and IT systems saying that what people needed was a dashboard of the system.
Like many things in business and in particular IT the dashboard analogy resulted in a huge number of dashboards. In my experience every business application and every technology has something that it calls a dashboard. Thus was born the concept of a single pane of glass to deliver need for a unified dashboard that consolidates everything that’s available in all the other dashboards.
(I had thought that this phrase was dead, but I’ve heard it several times recently)
I have seen many projects for delivered a single pane of glass. I have been involved in a few single pane of glass projects. I have never seen a successful single pane of glass project. I have seen a couple of projects come close to delivering a successful single pane of glass for a defined group of people and a moderate set of requirements. The reality is, no one really wants a single pane of glass, they want insight into the system and they want to understand where problems are, but they don’t need a single pane of glass to do it.
Cars don’t even have a single pane of glass, the driver has a dashboard, but once you open up the bonnet there are all sorts of indicators of vehicle health (fluid level indicators, dip-stick), plug a computer into the telemetry and you get even more insights into the health of the vehicle. As a driver you don’t want to see all the telemetry because it’s not helping you drive. As a mechanic the warning light on the dashboard doesn’t give you enough information.
Must business and IT systems are more complex than a car. The manager of that system may want one view of it, but it’s also likely that they want different views depending on the system and the current health of that system. The same is true for the operator of the system. They probably want a summary dashboard, but that’s not the same thing as a single pane of glass that brings all the information together. The summary dashboard may also provide links to all the other dashboards because that would be helpful, but it’s still not integrating everything into a single pane of glass. Apologies, I’m going on now, you get the idea.
Graham Chastney 