Hi Emily -- I was talking to a consultant a few weeks back about data volume overload in dashboards. What are you feelings on having too much data, and how do you avert that?

Thanks...Scott

Jan 18, 2012 -- 1:14PM, sellis wrote:

I am new to the Insider Learning Network and have a few quick questions.

How do I register for the Xcelsius authorities: Ask dashboard experts forum Tuesday, January 24?

For this forum, I am interested in the process of setting up a dashboard, how do you recommend selecting the critical few metrics to monitor?  How can the dashboard provide meaningful insights on your business, be drillable and be simple to administer and update?  Althought we have SAP in our company, it has not yet been deployed in our business unit, but I would love your insights about the broader questions outlining an approach to setting up a dashboard.

Thank you for the help.

Steve

Hi Sellis!

Thank you for your questions.  Let's take them one at a time.

To select the critical fiew metrics, start by asking the business users what is the purpose of the dashboard.  What decisions are they trying to make using the dashboard?  For Instance, if your dashboard is destined to answer questions around manufacturing operations, maybe your business users will need to know things like total output per hour, the amount of waste generated per material by standard business processes and areas that are most responsible for inefficiencies in the operational system.  I normally select up to six key metrics to start and then have a discussion around the type of visualization that would make the most sense.  With you as the dashboarding expert, you can provide insight on the available visualizations from Dashboards and the alternatives available.  Your users can usually derive value from the options that you give them and you can see the "lights" go on.

Your business users can also tell you if it makes sense to provide drill down functionality.  Typically, natural hierarchies will emerge.

Ease of administration and updating is up to you as a designer.  Make sure you keep your components clear and simple.  Make sure that the interactions between the components and the directly bound queries or cells within the spreadsheet are clearly organized and delineated.  Try color coding the cells within your spreadsheet to tell other users that data belongs in this cell and they should not be used for other means.  This type of "self documentation" makes it easier to hand dashboards off to others for simple updating and maintenance.

For the overall approach, I would simply gather the purpose of the dashboard(s).  Understand the business questions that the dashboard is goin to answer.  Keep the number of metrics small.  Use an agile iterative approach to provide quick value and then pave the way for enhancements in later phases.  Make sure you design the dashboards very simply and eliminate as much unnecessary components (images, lines, colors) as possible.  Most importantly, keep up your training on the latest advancements in the Dashboards applications and find resources that give different approaches on designing dashboards (perceptualedge.com, thedavisgang.com, everythingxcelsius.com) to understand how others approach similar questions in design and functionality.

Again, thank you for your questions!  Contact me if you need more info.

Chris
@chickman72 

We are publishing dashboard reporting using Fusion primarily because of the variety of chart options and interactive functionality in contrast to MS Office.  Can you provide any User Manual/Traning documention to review the how to and functionality of Xcelsius ?

Jan 24, 2012 -- 12:47PM, Scott Wallask wrote:

Hi Emily -- I was talking to a consultant a few weeks back about data volume overload in dashboards. What are you feelings on having too much data, and how do you avert that?

Thanks...Scott

Hi Scott,

Usually, we have encountered customers that want to transform reports into dashboards as their foray into the world of dashboards. As such, they are looking at passing thousands and even tens of thousands of rows. We recommend our customers look at the differences between what a dashboard accomplishes vs what a report does. Dashboards provide high-level summary information and the metrics are aggregated at the database/data warehouse level before being visualized in the dashboards.

Perhaps Chris Hickman might provide want to his perspective.

Emily-

jrleonard,

Thanks for joining us today. While there isn't an audio portion to this Q&A, we hope you continue to follow the discussion here and we welcome your question for our panel.

I'm also happy to take any feedback about the site, topics and format - feel free to contact me by linking here.

Kristine Erickson
Insider Learning Network editor