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I’ve taken you through the trenches of the organization and IT environment to find and capture what’s important to your audience. If you need to catch up, don your safari hat, some boots and check out this page. The next part in this series is one of my favorite areas and probably the most important. This is the part where you’ll show off the fruits of your labor, where the rubber meets the road in terms of how valuable your work and solutions will be for the business and your audiences. This is also the part that everything you do can come into question, be challenged, or simply blown off as garbage, eye candy or a waste of time and money.

Visualization of data and information is an art in itself. There have been many books written on the subject. See the Dashboards page for a list of references. Our goal here is simple. Take everything you’ve done to this point and present the message in the most meaningful, efficient and effective way possible for your audience’s consumption. Your challenge is to figure out what works best for your audience and to ensure that the message can be consumed and have the desired effects of prompting action, decision making, etc.

Iteration is key in getting the visualization right. Allow for a considerable amount of time in your project plans for work in this area. I strongly recommend mockups and prototyping in Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, Visio or your favorite graphics program such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop or Fireworks. A tip here is to look at the dashboard references or vendor products/presentations and cut/copy/paste the widgets (dials, gauges, charts, etc.) into your mockups and prototypes. It’ll help to be as close to what your capabilities are as you review with your various audiences. Keep on this task until you get buy in and a sense that this will work for them. Seek the 80% rule here.

I encourage you to ask your vendor for examples of successful dashboard deployments. See if you can speak to referencable customers and then really dive in with them about how they’ve visualized messages within their environments. A new blog is available that has been collecting examples of dashboards and visualizations called Dashboard Spy. I encourage you to take a look at what has been captured here for ideas.

There are references and links on the Dashboards page that will help you with all the right and wrong uses of gauges, stoplights, sliders, stoplights, charts, etc. I won’t go into those because I don’t necessarily have an opinion one way or another on what they are saying. I do know that every audience will be different. There will likely not be a one size fits all representation of your message. You may be able to get it to look similar, but I promise there will be someone who prefers a gauge or dial instead of stoplight or chart.

Once you’ve got the mocked up visualization of your message complete, it’s time to start implementing it within your solution. I’ll defer from speaking in detail on how to do this, but we’ve previously talked about how to generate events on what’s important and the message. Your solution should offer an easy way to extract this information from an event, database, or any other datasource for alignment and mapping into the visualization components that you will be using. It should be capable of processing these events, metrics, etc. in large quantities in real-time from a large number of distinct sources. You should be able to apply analytical logic, rules, calculations and statistical evaluations, timers, counters, etc. to any single piece of data or any group or collection of data. I’d be happy to recommend a very flexible solution for accomplishing this within your environment off-line.

Release your visualization into a controlled production environment and let it run over the course of the normal cycles associated with your message, what’s important and your data sources. Make sure you’ve also built up enough of the contextual references that may be needed. If you feel the visualization is at a point where it closely resembles your mockups using your solution and real data, it’s time to review and level set with your various audiences.

Get their feedback. Show them how it will work in production. Ask them if they “get” the message. Can they tell you what needs to be done or the state of the business? Will it work? Do they believe in it? Stand behind it? Iterate here until you get to this point. Go back and review everything you’ve done up to this point – discovery interviews, audience needs, what’s important, the message and make sure you’ve got everything covered.

When you’re 100% there, release into your production environment and place under your normal change, configuration and document controls. Establish a monthly or quarterly (at a minimum) review cycle to sit back down with the various audiences and review the solution with them. Talk with them. See how they use it. Capture metrics associated with any improvements, value, savings, etc. that can be attributed to the solution. Get them to vouch for these accomplishments. Don’t walk away from this review meeting without knowing what’s working, not working or needs to be changed or updated. There is nothing worse than a solution that’s not used or is ignored because it’s out of date or providing no value.

Here are some general guidelines I’ve picked up over the years will help ensure your success. Check the Dashboards page for more ideas and starting points. There are a lot of really good things out there from the BI, BPM and analytics folks!

Consumability

  • The message (what’s important) should be communicated in seven (7) seconds or less (one page/screen of information)
  • Choose 3-5 key messages, themes or topics to communicate for each audience or each level (see “Determining Your Audience” and “Determining Your Message“)
  • Keep things aggregated, correlated and presented in summarized views that prompt action
    (Is the ship on the right path? Do I need to take some action to steer around the iceberg? , How quickly do I need to take action?)
  • Try to convey a sense of movement or flow in a uniform manner for visualizations that represent activity, processes, workflow, transactions, etc. Keep them top to bottom or left to right as much as possible.
  • Try to draw your audience’s eyes to the most important parts of the message. Don’t let these get lost on the page.
  • Think Web2.0 – white space, rounded corners, smoothness, etc.
  • Don’t use wild color schemes. Avoid eye candy, all black backgrounds, etc. for more executive and non-technical audiences.

Freshness

  • Ideally one hour updates or more frequently
  • No more than one week’s data points on a dashboard (just enough to have some context on what’s happening)
  • Goal is to manage where the business is going “real-time” (using GPS) versus where we were yesterday (looking in rear view mirror)

Provide Context Where Relevant

  • Historical view/info providing as needed context for making decisions
  • Aggregate daily, weekly snapshot
  • Provide comparables – Hour of day compared to hour of day, Day of week compared to day of week, Week in month compared to week in month
  • Link out to or reference other sources that may provide context – avoid replicating data

Ease of Use

  • Should support drill down from any click-point or metric and maintain context through every click through
  • A common display panel is desirable for maintaining context. Clicking on a metric or indicator causes the results to be displayed in the common window.
  • Double clicking or right clicking would cause drill down
  • Hover displays are also useful for this approach, but not for key metric or indicator display (you want those immediately visible)
  • -“Breadcrumbs” should be used to help understand where in the navigation drilldown someone is and how they can get back to upper layers

Organizational Politics

  • Anticipate questions that may be asked
  • Have your ducks in a row – what’s important and why, your metrics catalog, source quality, etc.
  • Avoid overlap and “competition” with data warehouse, business intelligence/analysis or enterprise reporting groups
  • If results make an organization, department, group or person look bad, seek them out in advance to review and prepare them as needed

Stay tuned for my next planned topic in the “You’ve Got Events, Now What? series where I’ll focus on “Managing in Real-Time”.

Catch up with the “You’ve Got Events, Now What?” series here.