Week 5: Business Reporting, Visual Analytics & Dashboards
Business Reporting
Purpose: improve managerial decisions
Source: data from inside & outside the organisation
Format: text + table + graphs/charts
Report: fulfill 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
Types of Business Report
Metric Management Report
Help manage business performance through metrics (SLAs for external, KPIs for internal)
Can be used as Six Sigma &/ Total Quality Management
Dashboard-Type Report
Graphical presentation of several performance indicators in a single page
Balanced Scorecard-Type Report
Include financial, customer, business process and learning & growth indicators
Data Visualization
What is Data Visualization?
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
intersection of the fields of communication, information and scientific visualization, statistical graphics and design
Emergence of Data Visualization & Visual Analytics
Visual Analytics: information visualization + predictive analytics
Data/Information Visualization: descriptive, what happened?
Predictive Analytics: future focused, what will happen?
Performance Dashboards
commonly used in Business Performance Management Software suites & BI platforms
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 the belongs together should not be fragmented into multiple dashboards
Scrolling should not be regulated
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
Types of Dashboard
Summarized Graphical View
Purpose: monitor key performance metrics
Dashboards for Strategic Purposes (Monitoring)
Focus on high-level measures of performance
Don't require real-time data, static snapshots will do
Multidimensional View
Purpose: explore information from multiple dimensions
Dashboards for Analytical Purposes (Analysis)
Should support interactions with the data
Forecasts
Indicator of performance
Contextual information
Show patterns for further exploration (find out causes)
More sophisticated display media
Detailed Reporting View
Purpose: examine details before taking action
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
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 variety of system into a single, summarized, unified view of the business
enable drill-down/drill-through to underlying data sources/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 3 different levels
Pick the right visual constructs
Provided for guided analytics
Dashboard Components
Display Media: used to present and convey information in a meaningful way
Navigation & Container Components: group and display other components
Selector Components: used to create visualization with multiple options to select them
Alerts: used to draw attention to specific item that has reached a pre-defined limit
Display Media for Dashboards
Graphs: visualise quantitative data
Images: useful if images provide additional information
Icons: visualization of alerts/status
Drawing Objects: arrange and connect different elements on the dashboards
Text: used for labels/to report single measures on the dashboard
Organisers: arrange related business information
Expression of Data
Variations in Timing
Timeframe determined by objectives of dashboard
eg. year/quarter/month/week to date
Enrichment through Comparison
Provide context
eg. current year VS last year
Enrichment through Evaluation
Quick evaluation of whether data is good/bad
Usually encoded as visual objects
Serves as alerts on state of measures
Should not have too many states for the data
Non-Quantitative Dashboard Data
eg. top 10 customers, issues to be investigated, schedules, due dates
Types of Graphs
Bar & Column Graphs
Display multiple instances/measures rather than single instance/measure
Great for displaying measures associated with items in a category
Scale of Y axis does not start from 0 gives wrong perception of data
Stacked Bar/Column Graphs
Good for displaying multiple instances of whole and its parts with emphasis on the whole but is harder to read (stacked column)
Bar graphs reveal the shifts in the distribution of sales between the 4 channels more clearly than the stacked bar graph
Line Graphs
Reveal shape of data, trends, fluctuations, cycles, rates of change
Best for time-series data
Present overall picture rather than detail values
Pie Charts
Data is being expressed as part of a whole
Useful for displaying 6 elements or less
Heat Map
Data is being expressed as part of a whole
Useful for displaying more than 6 elements
Box Plots
Data with the same median & data range but different distribution
Good for describing distribution of data, median, range of values
Scatter Plots
Display whether or not and the direction and degree that 2 paired sets of a quantitative values are correlated
Involving more than 1 set of data
Shows the strength & positivity of correlation
Exhibits a curve rather linear correlation between the values
Combination Graphs
Bar & Line Graphs: Pareto Graph
uses 2 scales to eliminate wasted space that would appear in the gap between total revenue & individual sales
Good use of combination bar & line graphs
some data can be best displayed using bars & some using lines
Individual values displayed as columns
Cumulative tital of values displayed as line
What it shows?
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/how much they are skewed towards the top sub-categories
Good for analyzing 80-20 Rule
Unsuitable Graphs for Dashboards
Area Chart
Prone to inaccurate interpretation and often to occulsion
Display Media: Icons
Alert Icon: draws attention to a specific item that has reached a pre-defined limit
Up/Down Icons: convey simple message on whether a measure has gone up/down as compared to some point in the past/target
On/Off Icons: serves as flags to identify some items as different from others
Selector Components
Radio Button: users can select from a horizontal/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 Menu: provides a 2-level menu, users first select a category and then select items within that particular category
Organisers
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 displayed revenue split between 3 channels
to eliminate redundancy, avoid repeating the region labels, legend and overall title for each chart