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Week 5: Business Reporting, Visual Analytics & Dashboards (Part 1)…
Week 5: Business Reporting, Visual Analytics & Dashboards (Part 1) Chapter 2
Importance of Business Reporting
Types of Business Reports
Metric Management Reports
Help manage business performance through metrics (SLAs for externals; KPIs for internals)
Can be used as part of Six Sigma and/or Total Quality Management
Dashboard-Type Reports
Graphical presentation of several performance indicators in a single page
Balanced Scorecard-Type Reports
Include fiancial, customer, business process, and learning & growth indicators
Definitions and Concepts
Purpose: To improve managerial decisions
Source: Data from inside and outside the organization (via ETL)
Format: Text + Tables + Graphs/Charts
A report can fulfill many functions
To ensure proper departmental functioning
To provide information
To provide the results of an analysis
To persuade others to act
To create an organizational memory
A good report has the following attributes:
Clarity, Brevity, Completeness, Correctness
Different Types of Dashboards
Dashboards for Strategic Purposes (Monitoring)
Focus on high-level measures of performance
Forecasts
Indicators of performance
Contextual information
Don't require real-time data, static snapchosts will do
Summarized Graphical View
Purpose: Monitor Key Performance metrics
Dashboards for Analytical Purposes (Analysis)
Should support interactions with the data (e.g. drill-down)
Show patterns for further exploration (find out causes)
More sophisticated display media
Multidimensional View
Purpose: Explore information from multiple dimensions
Dashboards for Operational Purposes (Managing)
Real-time information is needed for constantly changing environment
Must grab attention immediately to alert abnormalies
Deeper level of details is needed - can be accessed by drilling down
Detailed Reporting View
Purpose: Examine details before taking action
Principles of Good Dashboard Design
What to look for in a dashboard?
Use of visual components to highlight data and exceptions that require action
Transparent to the user, meaning that they require minimal training and are extremely easy to use
Combine data from a vareity of systems into a single, summarized, unified view of the business
Enable drill-down or drill-through to underlying data sources or reports
Present a dynamic, real-world view with timely data
Require little coding to implement, deploy, and maintain
Best Practices in Dashboard Design
Benchmark KPIs with industry standards
Validate the design by a usability specialist
Prioritize and rank alerts and exceptions
Enrich dashboard with business‐user comments
Present information in three different levels
Pick the right visual constructs
Provide for guided analytics
Dashboard Components
Display Media:
are used to present and convey information in a meaningful way
Navigation and Container Components:
group and display other components
Selector Components:
are used to create visualization with multiple options to select from
Alerts:
are used to draw attention to specific item that has reached a pre-defined limit (e.g. budgets or benchmarks, plan data, etc)
Display Media: Icons
- simple images that communicate a clear and simple meaning (e.g. Alert, Up/Down, On/Off)
Draw attention to a specific item that has reached a pre-defined limit (e.g. budgets or benchmarks, plan data, etc)
Must be simple and noticeable
Limit alert levels to a maximum of two and ideally one
Common alert scheme uses the traffic light metaphor composed of 3 colours for 3 meaning. Green typically used to indicate that all is well
A single shape such as circle or square involving distinct intensities of the same hue works best.
Up/Down Icons - convey simple message on whether a measure has gone up or down as compared to some point in the past or the target
On/Off Icons - serve as flags to identify some items as different from others
Selector Components
Selector components let you create interactive dashboards with multiple selections
Radio Button: users can select from a horizontal or vertical group of selections
Combo Box: provides a vertical list of items, when it is clicked, users can select an item from the list
Accordion Menu:provides a two‐level menu, users first select a category and then select items within that particular category
Know when to use different types of display media like charts, gauges, drawing objects, icons and alerts (e.g. Traffic Lights)
Graphs: Visualize quantitative data (e.g. one single key measure or data series)
Images: Useful if images provide additional information
Icons: Visualization of alerts or status (e.g. on/off)
Drawing objects: Arrange and connect different elements on the dashboards (e.g. to visualize processes or hierarchical relationships between elements)
Text: Used for labels or to report single measures on the dashboard
Organizers: Arrange related business information (e.g. as tables or geographically in maps)
Different Types of Graphs
Basic Charts & Graphs
Line Chart
Bar Chart
Pie Chart
Scatter Plot
Bubble Chart
Specialized Charts and Graphs
Histogram
Gantt Chart
PERT Chart
Geographic Map
Bullet Graph
Heat Map/ Tree Map
Highlight Table
GRAPHS NOT SUITABLE FOR DASHBOARDS
Area Charts - Prone to inaccurate interpretation and often to occlusion (object is hidden entirely or in part behind another)
Images
Scatter Plots
Display whether or not and the direction and degree that 2 paired sets of quantitative values are correlated
Line of best fit makes the direction and strength of correlation stand out more
Exhibits a curve rather linear correlation between the values
Box Plots
Data with the same median and data range but different distribution
Good for describing distribution of data, median, range of values
Combination bar and line graphs: Pareto Chart
Uses 2 scales to eliminate wasted space that would appear in the gap between total revenue and individual sales
Some data can be best displayed using bars
Some data can be best displayed using lines (see shape of data, trend)
Individual values displayed as columns
Cumulative total of values displayed as a line
Slope of line: the steeper the line, the greater the sub-category's revenue was relative to the next best sub-category
Line shows how evenly distributed the contributions of the sub-category are or how much they are skewed towards the top sub-categories
Good for analyzing 80-20 Rule
Heat Maps
- Data is being expressed as part of a whole. Useful for displaying more than 6 elements.
Pie Charts
- Data is being expressed as part of a whole. Useful for displaying 6 elements or less
Line Graphs
Reveal shape of data, trends, fluctuations, cycles, rates of change
Best for time-series data
Present overall picture rather than detail values:
Is it going up or down?
Is it violatile?
Does it go through seasonal cycle?
Suitable for Interval Scale but not Nominal Scale
Stacked Bar/Column graphs
Good for displaying multiple instances of whole and its parts with emphasis on the whole but is harder to read
Bar graphs reveal the shifts in the distribution of sales between the four channels are more clearly than the stacked bar graph
Easier to analyse than the pie charts
Bar & Column Graphs
Display multiple instances/measures rather than single instance/measure
Great for displaying measures associated with items in a cateogory (e.g. regions, departments)
Easier to analyse as compared to pie charts
Other Dashboard Objects
Text:
Some information has to be encoded as text
e.g. YTD Revenue
Images:
Photos,illustrations,diagrams
Unnecessary for most typical business uses
Drawing Objects
Useful for arranging and connecting pieces of information
e.g. displaying information about activities in a process or tasks in a proejct, hierarchical relationship in an organisation chart
Understanding how to express data in a dashboard
Variations in Timing
Timeframe determined by objectives of dashboard
e.g. This year/quarter/month/week to date
Enrichment through Comparison
Provide context
e.g. This year vs. last year
Enrichment through Evaluation
Quick evaluation of whether data is good or bad
Usually encoded as visual objects (e.g. traffic light)
Serves as alerts on state of measures
Should not have too many states for the data
Non-Quantitative Dashboard Data
e.g. Top 10 Customers, Issues to be investigated, schedules, due dates, etc
Types of Data
Categorical: Nominal (e.g. Sales, Operations, HR) , Ordinal (e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd) , Interval (e.g. 0-99, 100-199, 200-299)
Numeric (Measures): e.g. Revenue, Sales, Costs, Quantity, etc
Organisers
Sets of information need to be arranged in a particular manner to communicate clearly
Three ways of organising and arranging information:
Tables
Spatial maps
Small multiples
Tables - for arranging data, graphs, icons and images into columns and rows
Spatial maps - for finding meaning for spatially distributed data
Small multiples
Series of horizontally aligned small multiples display revenue split between 3 sales channels
To eliminate redundancy, avoid repeating the region labels, legend and overall title for each chart
Data Visualization
The use of visual representations to explore, make sense of, and communicate data
Provide insights into complex data sets by communicating key information in more intuitive and meaningful ways
An intersection of the fields of communication, information and scientific visualization, statistical graphics and design
Visual Analytics: Information visualization + predictive analytics
Data/Information visualization: descriptive, what happened?
Predictive analytics: Future-focused, what will happen?
Emergence of new companies
Tableau, OlikView, etc
Increased focus by the big players
SAP launched Visual Intelligence
SAS launched Visual Analytics
Microsoft bolstered PowerBI
IBM launched Cognos Insight
Oracle acquired Endeca
Performance Dashboards
Performance dashboards are commonly used in Business Performance Management (BPM) software suites and BI platforms
Dashboards provide visual displays of important information that is consolidated and arranged on a single screen so that information can be digested at a single glance and easily drilled in and further explored
Limits of Short-Term Memory
Iconic Memory
Visual memory buffer
Preattentive processing (preconscious)
(Things that stand out & Grouping of objects)
Short-term memory (conscious)
Limited storage capacity
(Information that belongs together should not be fragmented into multiple dashboards & scrolling should not be required)
Stores 3-9 chunks of visual information at a time
A "chunk": pattern formed by 1 or more lines in a line graph
Long-term memory
Permanent