Archive for the ‘Dashboards’ category

Dashboards or Brashboards?

November 1st, 2009

I’ve had a couple of days away from the office and spent some time doing arty stuff with the kids.  While we had the table covered in glitter and glue I got them to help me with an extension of the point I was making in my last post on dashboard layouts.  I made the claim then that a lot of dashboards we see look like those fuzzy felt pictures we used to play with at school and quite literally throw together.  The issue is not the content, it is the way the content is presented and how little thought seemingly goes into that presentation.  Here’s what we came up with in a few minutes:

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The scary thing is it isn’t a million miles away from what you get if you do a Google image search for ‘Executive Dashboard’.  I’m starting to suspect that not a lot of thought has gone into the design of those devices either.

So let’s think a little more about the purpose of the executive dashboard in a modern university:

  • inform the university executive about institutional performance
  • communicate instantly, clearly and unambiguously
  • automatically highlight matters that require attention (not just extremes)

Such a device might do this through:

  • comparing actual performance against targets and/or prior periods
  • careful selection and limited use of colours and saturations
  • intuitive and informative arrangement of elements
  • deliberate removal of unnecessary ‘clutter’ such as axis values when providing macro context
  • use of simple elements - tables, bar, column, line, sparkline and bullet charts
  • dynamic highlighting of data determined to be of high importance
  • aesthetically clean and appealing presentation of information

If you review your favourite local BI report, the one you’re really proud of, does it achieve any of the above?  I did and it didn’t, but the change needed is underway.  When you do make change in light of improved understanding, the improvement really is quite obvious and something that can be learned.

I’ve actually been reading and learning (a lot) about visualisation for a little while now and I know there is a wealth of information out there to help us avoid building fuzzy felt disasters, but they just keep on coming.

I personally cringe when I see a lot of presentations, television commercials (oh don’t even go there) and magazine ads.  Does that make me a visualisation snob?  I guess it could but it also makes me want to evangelise even more.  I firmly believe part of our role as BI/DW professionals is to do a great job of communicating information.  The better and more developed our appreciation of good design, the better our communication, and as everyone keeps telling me these days, you can’t communicate too much.

If you’re curious about your ability to judge between good and bad graph design then have a go at Stephen Few’s Graph Design IQ Test and if you think you need some help then his book Information Dashboard Design should probably be on your desk (a lot of this also applies to BI report design too by the way).

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Posted in Dashboards, Visualisation

Is the Cart Still Before the Horse?

October 29th, 2009

I’m quite excited because we are currently reviewing some designs for an executive dashboard.  Now that we finally have lots of beautiful dimensionally modelled data in our warehouse with periodic snapshots going back almost 3 years, we are actually at a point where we can present some of it together in a highly aggregated manner to hopefully inform, influence and improve strategic decision making at our institution.

cart_before_horse

I first used the above slide back in 2007 at the Cognos Asia-Pacific Forum to remind people that dashboards are the veneer of a BI/DW platform.  You simply cannot sustain an integrated dashboard without the underlying atomic data and that data takes a long time to get.  The quote I read at the time still stands:

“…the worst case theme is often called a scorecard or executive dashboard. This deceptively simple application draws on data from almost all business processes in the organisation. You can’t create the entire dashboard until you’ve built the whole warehouse foundation. Or worse you end up building the dashboard by hand every day, manually extracting, copying, and pasting data from all those sources to make it work. It can be difficult to get business folks to understand the magnitude of the effort involved in creating this ’simple’ report.” Ralph Kimball

So now that we have the data, you might think it relatively easy to create that dashboard, the one that people have been clamoring for since we started this wonderful process…

There are, it seems, an endless stream of people proclaiming what wonderful dashboards they have in their organisations but yet when you look a little more closely they often appear to be a disjointed jumble of content thrown together like one of those fuzzy felt pictures you used to play with at pre-school - lots of bright distracting pictures pointing all over the place, sort of related and sort of telling you an overall story, but then again not really.  They catch the attention for a few seconds and then, purpose served, their time is done.

It seems odd that this situation prevails, I wonder why that might be.  It certainly isn’t helped by the major vendors in the BI space who seem to believe that their purpose is to appeal to the fuzzy felt designers.

Working in BI/DW in higher education clearly means we all like a challenge and this is up there with the best I’ve had cause to think about recently.  How to effectively map the major processes of a university on a single screen, in an enduring manner, and in a way that simply and rapidly communicates an overall situation.  I’ll keep you posted…

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Dashboards, Higher Education, Visualisation