Data Visualization in Business Intelligence

I’ve been at Information Builders for almost 2 months and I have to say, I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what our BI software, WebFOCUS is capable of. One thing I have been exploring is integration of javascript libraries into WebFOCUS reports.

I found a sparkline and bullet graph open source jquery library online. I thought it would be very useful in WebFOCUS reports. You can accomplish the same with WebFOCUS only (although I have not personally done it) but I really wanted to see how easy it was to integrate a third party javascript library.

It was pretty easy. :D

Here are the results of integrating sparklines, bullet graphs, and state indicators into a WebFOCUS report.

You can download the zip package that includes the example FEX file and a Read Me.

Download the zip package here. If you’re not familiar with the Google Drive interface, click on File on the top left and select the download menu item to download the file.

Cool beans, eh?

I was planning to write yet another article on key performance indicators for Dashboard Insight because I felt Dashboard Insight needed an up-to-date reference for those who did not practice in performance management. I initially started writing the article, thinking I didn't need any reference material. I've lived through understanding, discovering, and refining measures for the last six years and I felt I could write it solely on experience.

Surprisingly, I had a hard time defining what a key performance indicator is without having to introduce more terms and, thus, more explanations.

Further reflecting on my experiences in business intelligence, I wasn’t sure if a simple explanation was possible. One person's performance indicator may be another's key performance indicator. For example, the number of leads by day would be a performance indicator for the CEO; however, for the marketing department, it may be a key performance indicator. The confusion doesn't stop there. Technically speaking, it could be a key result indicator for marketing - the number of leads is the result of all the activities marketing performs.

After much confusion trying to explain the difference between performance and key performance indicators (AND result indicators), I decided to step back and look at it from a different perspective.

Rather than fight through terminology, these are the questions decision makers need to ask themselves when choosing measures to look at:

1. Is the measure clearly linked to an activity that I am responsible for?
2. Does the measure support another measure to help in my decision-making process?

If the answer is no to both questions, than the measure is simply nice-to-have. There's nothing wrong with having these types of measures as part of your report or dashboard.

If you're not a performance management practitioner, you don't need to understand concepts like lead and lag indicators or result and performance indicators. Let the performance management consultants deal in those terms. Just remember to ask yourself these questions when you're given measures to look at and you'll know whether or not you need them to help support your decisions.

Many will question the simplicity of my explanation, but I believe that this is a good starting point for anyone who plans on working with performance management consultants.

It’s almost been a month since I started my new role at Information Builder’s as a Solutions Director and felt it was time to start up my personal blog again.

For my first post in many months, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about my experiences with Dashboard Insight and why I choose to move on to Information Builders (IBI).

Dashboard Insight gave me a unique opportunity to run a company without worrying about my financial situation. I learned a lot about web analytics, search engine optimization, and, most importantly for me, the business intelligence technologies out there. In addition, it gave me an opportunity to brush up on dashboard design and performance management.

One of the major events that I coordinated was the dashboard design contest. I am quite proud of the intent of the contest and the winning submissions. Hopefully, Dashboard Insight turns it into an annual event. I genuinely believe that I was on the right track of promoting data visualization and dashboard design best practices.

However, running a website is not my strength. Although I increased visitors by about 10% and I averaged about 100 twitter followers a month, I knew I was never going to reach the goals set by the owners. In addition, I was getting tired of talking about business intelligence and wanted to get back into developing BI solutions.

Those feelings led me to Information Builders. As a company that provides tools for the entire BI stack (master data management all the way to performance management), it was a company I could not say no to.

So here I am today, ready to start architecting BI solutions again. I’ve gotten myself familiar with our reporting tool WebFOCUS and I’m ready to dig deeper. I look forward to sharing my experiences with you.

Who knows, maybe I will be providing some dashboard design workshops in the near future. :D

I found this interesting blog post that brought the following to my attention. Yahoo! Mail data is now readily available for people to see through their visualization site here. It's cool but I have a hard time understanding how to read the data.

For example, it's not clear what the size of the bubbles means. I'm guessing it represents the number of emails being sent. When I click on the bubble, I actually have no idea what the animation represents. When I click on one of the email images, it gets even more confusing. Play around with it and you'll know what I mean.

More importantly, what is an average user suppose to do with this data? It doesn't tell anything that I could use to better use Yahoo! Mail.

This visual analysis tool gets a 10 on the cool factor but gets a 1 for relevancy.

A couple of weeks ago I declared war on poor dashboard designs. Now, I've officially shot the first volley. I have been planning a dashboard design contest on Dashboard Insight for the last few weeks and now it is live. If you want to join my fight, then sign up for the contest. The winner will be featured on Dashboard Insight's home page and they will receive an iPad 2 and a collection of must read BI books. Our sponsors include Dundas, Tableau, QlikView, InetSoft, and XLCubed. They believe in the importance of this contest and I hope you show your support by entering.

ComputerWorld Canada recently did a survey on executives and their experiences with BI.

I don't like being snarky but I thought the questions that were asked to the 70 Canadian IT execs were not the right questions to ask. Here they are:

• Do you have a standard BI platform across the organization?
• Is BI critical to your organization?
• Does IT spend a lot of time preparing BI data?

I think the first question is irrelevant. Does it really matter if an organization uses several tools? My answer is no, as long as they get the job done and it's not a maintenance nightmare for IT. In fact, some of the vendors that provide the entire suite don't usually live up to their claims, anyways. I.e. organizations are looking for additional tools such as data visualization software to complement an SAP or Cognos implementation.

The second question is important but too vague. If the respondent is unfamiliar with the concepts of BI, then the answer would be no. In fact, I would argue that everyone who took the survey does ask for data and analyzes it to some degree to make decisions. Maybe a better question would be, "Do you work with data to make decisions that affect the bottom line?"

The final question, which I think the question needs to be reworded, as well. What would be more interesting to know is how many of these respondents scrapped a BI project because of the latency in getting data to them.

Surveys are hard to design but to say that these are the 3 critical questions to ask is bold.

On Thursday, I posted an Op Ed on Dashboard Insight declaring a war on poor dashboard designs. In the article, I gave suggestions on how to transition out requirements such as 3D charts and speedometers. This is just the first battle in this war. However, at the end of it, I believe we will win and bring a much needed new era in dashboards and business intelligence.

How can you help? Stay tuned until next Friday...

There's a lot of interesting opinions that are circulating on the web about laptops and desktops being replaced by smart phones and tablets. With current mobile devices' small screen space and lack of a full keyboard, I doubt very much that's going to happen any time soon. Imagine creating a spreadsheet or writing a document on that type of interface. It would be painful and frustrating.

Office productivity software leverages keyboard shortcuts and mouse interactions such as right click to give you quicker access to features. In addition, screen real estate is VERY important. I've used two monitors since 2000 with one monitor for my active work space and the other as displaying resource content such as a secondary text document or a webpage. That has significantly increased my productivity. Don't believe me?

Microsoft Research's VIBE (Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment) team did a study on using multiple monitors. Findings showed that there was a 9% increase on productivity. In fact, there were some tasks such as copy and paste that increased productivity by 50%.

Mobile devices are a great read-only device such as reading documents or using it to present a slide deck. Specifically for business intelligence, they are great for monitoring operational measures such as inventory levels and time of delivery.

Office productivity software vendors have to start working with mobile device manufacturers if mobile devices are to replace laptops and desktops. Otherwise, they will stay a read-only device. At least to me and the majority of other practical business users.

I recently posted an article on Dashboard Insight to answer the question: what is BI? In the article I didn't dive into the details of the processes, the data, the technology, and all the other intricacies of BI. I purposely did that because I felt all the other BI resources explained BI in the traditional sense very well. What I wanted to drive home with my article was the importance of aligning strategic goals with operational activities. It sounds obvious but from my experience I find BI initiatives do not take this into account. BI usually means streamlining the process of getting data to the decision makers. 

In a recent report, Gartner stated that 70% - 80% of BI projects fail. Many reasons are provided including: aligning IT with corporate, the analogy to software development project failures, and lack of training.

I opine it's the poor communication of corporate goals to the workforce. Add that to the definition of BI and I think people will start looking at BI as more than just quickly getting large sets of data to decision makers.

My post last week on mobile BI centered around Microsoft's strategy. Interestingly enough, a recent survey on mobile BI mentioned on Dashboard Insight revealed that dashboards were not being adopted by business users for business intelligence purposes. In fact, the results were a staggering 3% using smart phones for business applications and 7% using tablets.

I'm not really surprised. The survey was answered by managers. Mobile BI is more beneficial to those who are out in the field dealing directly with clients or on client sites. Managers who do not have these types of responsibilities can't take full advantage of information on-the-go. Consider the following scenario. The IT Network manager receives notifications with information regarding the health of mission critical web servers. However, they are not the one's responsible for fixing the problem. That is left up to the network support team. The manager knows about the situation but they can't really do anything about it so it's NOT mission critical to them. If he's going to just call to make sure the situation is being looked at, that's inefficient and unnecessary. The notification should just go directly to the network team.

As a manager myself, reports and ad-hoc analysis tools are not beneficial for me on a mobile device as I don't typically work directly with client's onsite. In addition, there's more to data analysis then just looking at some numbers and graphs. I need to write up my findings and communicate with others to further understand the data. Phones and tablets are great for calling and sending out text messages / emails, but it is not practical to write up documents on it.

If mobile BI is to make a difference in the corporate world, vendors need to focus on the people on the field, not managers.