Archive for the ‘Visualisation’ 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:

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

Gaining a Perceptual Edge

September 17th, 2009

Some great news for Aussie fans of visualisation legend Stephen Few - he is coming to Australia next year to deliver a 3-day workshop in Sydney. You can download a course brochure with all the details here. Organised by Altis Consulting who also brought Ralph Kimball to these shores it is looking like one of those not-to-be-missed opportunities if you’re serious about your BI.

My personal view is that we still don’t pay enough attention to the final presentation of information, we spend huge amounts of effort, time and money getting our beautiful data structures and architectures in place and then just punt out a few charts using whatever defaults the BI tool of choice happens to use. The presentation of data is an opportunity to get that extra value out of your BI investment, producing visualisations that not only look good but which assist in understanding and communicating the real messages hidden in the data.

Here’s a bit of background from Stephen from his Perceptual Edge website

…I write the monthly Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter, speak regularly at conferences (such as The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) and DAMA), and teach in the MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2004 I wrote the first comprehensive and practical guide to business graphics entitled Show Me the Numbers, in 2006 I wrote the first and only guide to the visual design of dashboards, entitled Information Dashboard Design and in 2009 I wrote the first introduction for non-statisticians to visual data analysis entitled Now You See It….

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Posted in Education, Visualisation

Correlation Street

September 10th, 2009

I mentioned to a few people at the recent AAIR Load Management SIG that I believed there were some leading indicators that might be useful in gauging demand and therefore load way ahead of the actual enrolment process. I’ve had this hunch for a long time but hadn’t quite managed to find the time to see if it was true.

Well, yesterday I did a little bit of digging and I think the results are quite interesting, almost exciting even. Just to back up a little, the issue we have is being able to understand the main variable of load forecasting - the commencing student intake (we can get the continuing numbers through the use of retention statistics).

Right now we’re concerned with the main 2010 first semester intake, the census date for which is way off into the future (March 31st next year). At that point we will know what our commencing load and income will be. Until then it is all down to the black art of load forecasting - or is it?

If we look at admission applications and compare the numbers with the eventual enrolments we find a pretty good correlation. Here is how things ended up for us last year in terms of commencing students, each dot represents a course. This data however shows all admissions for last year and all eventual enrolments. I need to do an ‘on this day last year’ comparison to see if this is truly a leading indicator this far ahead of time, but either way it gives us a high confidence level at least a month or so ahead of census date.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. What if we look at leading indicators of admission activity? We’re talking about demand generation here, the interest in a subject that ultimately becomes translated into an enrolment if we achieve conversion in Marketing speak.

So what might it look like if we took the number of course searches carried out ahead of the up-coming admission and enrolment period? Might this show some relation to the eventual enrolment? Well I think it does.

The above chart shows the number of course searches in the month of September 2008 compared to the subsequent final enroloment in that same course at March 31st 2009, that is over 7 months into the future.

At this stage the figures are pretty rough and the process is quite manual but it only took a couple of hours yesterday to do this and I think the chart speaks for itself.

The other great thing about course and indeed unit searches is that they are high in volume. We’ve been capturing this data since September 2007 and have over 9.2 million individual searches.

So the next step in our quest for automated and dynamic load forecasting is to somehow use these leading indicators to bring perhaps just a little systems input to bear on the mysterious black art. Hopefully, (much) more (very) soon…

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Load Management, Visualisation

Obama on Education

September 9th, 2009

US President Obama’s speech on Education seemed like a prime candidate for a Wordle. You can see the entire transcript here and watch a video of it here, but I think the image below also conveys the content well. This happens to contain the top 400 words and common English words have been removed.

I like this speech, its inspiring and motivating and good wholesome stuff that no one can really argue with, nothing wrong with that in my mind. The biggest word for me - responsibility - of the personal kind. Education says Obama, is your responsibility.