Data Visualization in Business Intelligence

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