I’ve been spending some of my 10% research time on building an internal company metrics dashboard to display in the office.   The idea is to increase transparency within the company as well as provide an easy way for staff members to see what is going on in various areas of the company.

A few months ago I stumbled upon the Geckoboard product which provides a slick SaaS dashboard publishing system.   It had prebuilt integrations to a number of services that we use (Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Calendars, Pingdom, Mailchimp, and Twitter) and so it was a natural choice to get things started.    Since custom widgets can point to our own data services, we can publish any sort of metric we desire to.

You can get a sense of what this looks like in the snapshot from today above.   I particularly find it interesting to see the ebb and flow of website traffic.   We had a surge in traffic in May, so this month’s web visits are down in comparison to the previous month.   (It makes me wonder when Google Analytics will gain the ability to adjust for cyclical trends like we do in HunchLab).

More recently, we were asked to beta test the new mapping widget that Geckoboard rolled out.   It was pretty easy for two of our developers (Andrew J and Carissa) to generate a feed of recent legislative district matches being conducted via the Cicero API to display on the widget.      Now, it’s almost immediately apparent to the Cicero team when one of our clients conducts outreach in a particular state, since the state becomes covered in blue dots on the map — which is pretty cool.

We’ll be steadily working to publish more metrics on the dashboards in the weeks and months to come, which will find their way onto our spiffy new office metrics display.