Good news!
Our IT guys looked into the Riverbed Steelhead network configuration again and found that we needed to add entries for the BOE server so that the SWF file is optimized and cached on the remote device. Then only the deltas (the query data is retrieved over the WAN.
Our dashboard load times over a T1 dropped from 70+sec to under 20 seconds which is similar to what we see at our corporate sites.
Here is a link to the Riverbed product
WAN Optimization (Steelhead) | Riverbed
Lee Lewis