Business Reporting, Visual Analytics & Dashboards

Business Reporting, Visual Analytics & Dashboards

1. Type of Business Reports

   • Metric Management Reports: Help manage biz performance thru metrics (aka measures) by using SLAs (service level agreement - one time for externals and KPIs for internals. Can be used with Six Sigma or TOM (total quality management
   • Dashboard-Type Reports: Graphical presentation of performance indicators in a single page using dials/gauges
   • Balanced Scorecard-Type Reports: (e.g.) financial, customer, business process, learning & growth indicators

2. Type of Dashboards

   • Strategic (Managing) Dashboards: Focuses on high level measures of performance like forecasts, indicator of performance,or contextual information. It does not require real-time data, static snapshots will do
   • Analytical Dashboards: Support interactions with the data (e.g.) drill down, show patterns for further exploration, displays a more sophisticated display media
   • Operational (Monitoring) Dashboards: Requires real time info as the environment is everchanging, grabs attention immediately to alert abnormalies, deeper level if details are needed and can be accessed by drilling down

3. Layers of Information

   • Top Layer: Summarized Graphical View that shows/ monitors key performance metrics, displays graphical indicators, numbers and text. Requires information from dashboards, scorecard and portals.
   • Middle Layer: Multidimensional View that aims to explore information from multiple dimension. It displays interactive charts and tables, and requires interactive reports and OLAP
   • Bottom Layer: Detailed Reporting View that assist in examination of details before an action is taken. It displays a table or report in a separate window and requires operational reports and data warehouse queries

4. Visual Perception in Pre-attentive Processing

   • Visual Attributes
     • COLOUR: Hue, Intensity of colour
     • POSITION: 2D, 3D
     • FORM: Orientation, line length, line width, size, shape, added marks, enclosure
     • MOTION: Flicker (Attn grabbing attribute - its colour changes back and forth or repeatedly appears and disapears)

5. Data Visual Representation

   • Bar and Column Graphs: Great for displaying measures associated with items in a category (region, departments etc)
   • Line Graphs: Reveals shape for data trends, fluctuations, cycles, rates of change. Best for data with time. Presents an overview rather than detail: Going up/down? Volatile/Non Volatile? Does it go thru seasonal cycles?
   • Scatterplots: Displays if the direction and degree that 2 paired sets of quantitative values are correlated. Best fit line = better brings out the direction and strength of correlation. Closer to line, the better = strong correlation. Upward line = positive correlation. Downward = Negative.
   • Bar+Line Graphs (Pareto Chart): Individual values displayed as bars. Cumulative total of values displayed in a line. Shows the slope of the line (steeper = greater diff between sales revenue to the next best ____. Line shows how evenly distributed the contributions of the salesperson are or how far away are they from the best sales person. *Rank x-axis best to worst (salesperson). Is the 80-20 rule met?
   • Box Plot: Describes distribution of data, median, and range of values. *(top line) highest value, (75th percentile, median, 25th percentile) 50% of values, lowest value ( bottom line)
   • *Axis scale