Hi Stephen,
We have great experience with GIS dashboards particularly for the telecom industry. Different GIS vendors have different offerings. ArcGIS is the most full featured one which handles data and GIS into a single offering. You can have a look at a lot of examples here: http://www.esri.com/products/maps-we-love
As for free offerings the Google maps API is great, although you have to work setup and use your own database. Its more customisable than Data maps. You can look at the examples provided here https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/ by clicking on them to see the depth of offering. If your use case agrees with Section 9 here and you dont want to go with ArcGIS then this is a great option: https://developers.google.com/maps/terms
Datamaps seems like an option for the most simplest of visualisations i.e. simple chloropeths. If the types of operations are only limited to the visualizations given in the example then its fine.
Also other examples you could look at are Tableau also, though its a paid offering, theres a whole lot it can do https://www.tableau.com/stories/topic/maps
If you want to discuss this further feel free to email me your number and lets have a quick call.
Best Regards,
Iqbal Talaat Bhatti iqbal@acit.com
Sorry Ray we have this tasked completed - the project is open only for administrative purposes closing it shortly - apologies.