[wpietri]

Agreed! I find dashboards at most companies disappointing. And often for the same reason I find other stuff on their walls disappointing: it's frequently irrelevant or actively unhelpful to the work actually being performed.

For me, good dashboards are like good checklists: they should be living entities owned by the team in question and regularly updated to address active concerns. And they don't even have to be complex. Back before CI was in fashion, I drove giant changes in a team's behavior just by having a single LED indicator (the now-departed Ambient Orb) show the state of the current build. Previously, the build would stay broken for weeks at a time, only converging to green around the time of release. Nobody liked that, but they were used to it, so they'd just work around it. But once it was visible and discussed, they eventually got so the build was green almost all the time. It was less painful and saved a bunch of time.

I would absolutely love to try out a set of ambient audio indicators. I suspect I'd want to try it along with a visual dashboard, because the moment I hear something anomalous, I'm going to want to look up and see the recent history, so I can correlate the audio with what it represents and what else is going on.