The hierarchy of interactive dashboard needs. Five requirements for successful dashboard projects

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1 Five requirements for successful dashboard projects

2 The hierarchy of interactive dashboard needs Getting back to the purpose of BI In its 2014 BI Magic Quadrant Report, Gartner states that the ability to meet the dual demands of enterprise IT and business users remains a challenge, meaning vendors are struggling to give users what they want tools to help them make better, factbased decisions that also play nicely within an organization s existing IT landscape. In a drive to simplify and to get back to the original purpose of BI, we believe that interactive dashboards should be the starting point, and indeed the go-to tool, for the vast majority of people within any organization. In fact, for anybody who doesn t have analyst in their job-title, interactive dashboards could be the only form of BI they need. Why interactive dashboards are the only end-user BI you need Interactive dashboards are an evolution of the original dashboards. Gone are the days when business users were satisfied with a static, at-a-glance view of their business information. Natural curiosity means business users, when they spot an anomaly with one of their figures, want to understand how that number is constituted by drilling into lower levels of detail, to ultimately help them make better-informed decisions. That s just human nature. We believe that interactive dashboards are the only form of BI the majority of users need because when implemented correctly, dashboards are perfectly packaged BI: Good interactive dashboards present key information in a visually compelling manner for rapid assimilation, whilst supporting drill-down to lower levels of detail to enable users to investigate anomalies Good interactive dashboard tools allow designers to implement workflows that reflect an organization s underlying business process resulting in intuitive interfaces that require zero-training, rather than relying on users to

3 make do with packaged reporting or to struggle with generic data discovery tools with highly non-trivial interfaces. Good interactive dashboards provide users with controlled flexibility allowing them to get different views of the data to answer their second and third level questions, without needing to go back to the BI team. Interactive dashboards + mobile = the killer BI app When coupled with tablet devices, interactive dashboards become killer applications that are desirable, usable and highly useful. This heady combination of tablet and interactive dashboard is the key to mass BI adoption within organizations, enabling us to finally break through the elusive 20-25% adoption ceiling that has plagued BI deployments for more than a decade. Planning for success with interactive dashboards view of user requirements and understanding not just what users needs are today, but anticipating what their needs will become in the future. The good news is that, based on our experience of hundreds of dashboards projects, we have seen that users needs evolve in a predictable manner. To help you plan your dashboard projects and to anticipate how your users requirements evolve (and with a hat-tip to Abraham Maslow), we have developed a hierarchy of interactive dashboard needs, which come in five layers, each building on the ones below: 1) Visualization 2) Drill 3) Pivot 4) Custom workflows 5) Structured ad-hoc In the rest of this ebook we look in more detail at the five layers, explain why each is important to business users and offer some suggestions on what to look out for when selecting an interactive dashboard tool. However, to ensure success with interactive dashboards BI Teams need to recognize that their business users needs will evolve and mature over time. This means taking a longer term

4 1) Visualization they can get the information they need and get on with their job as quickly as possible. Just as important as efficiency is visual appeal. Like it or not, the more engaging dare we say sexy the user interface is, the more users will use it. ipad applications have set a new bar for UIs; make sure your dashboards live up to this or face reduced user adoption. Tool selection The starting point for any dashboard is to provide business users with a quick, at-a-glance overview of summary data. Why this matters to users Business users are data users, not data experts and they are always busy. To make better-informed decisions they need quick, effective access to data to help them to do their job more efficiently. Dashboards enable business users to visualize key information relevant to the task at hand in a simple, easily digested format so Most dashboard tools provide a wide selection of components including charts, grids (e.g. tables, cross tabs) and selectors (e.g. drill bars, filter bars, list boxes), all of which can be hooked up to your corporate data sources. Many dashboard tools support multi-tabbed or multi-faceted views so the dashboard designer can provide users with alternate views of their information from within a single physical dashboard. The best dashboard tools support a free-form layout, allowing designers to layout the dashboard exactly how their business users want, rather than forcing a layout based on some form of template grid system.

5 2) Drill However, drilling on individual components is not enough. Dashboards usually comprise multiple views of the same data so when one drills, the others must automatically drill too. If a user has to think about which views are showing which level of detail and manually keep them in sync this will inevitably lead to frustration, inefficiency and worst of all, decisions based on bad information. Tool selection However, at-a-glance summaries of information are never enough. Human nature being what it is, business users inevitably want to drill into their data to explore lower levels of detail. Why this matters to users Business intelligence is there to drive action, so when an enduser spots an anomaly with one of their figures they need to be able to drill into the problem to find out the cause and determine a remedy. Most dashboard tools allow you to implement basic drill where you can navigate up and down one or more hierarchies on a single component. However, many tools simply provide a layout of grids and graphs on the page with little or no interactivity between components in effect, each component is implemented in isolation, meaning if you drill on a chart only that chart drills and none of the other components are effected. The best interactive dashboard tools support synchronized drill down so when you drill on one component other related components also drill, presenting a consistent, and far more intuitive, view to the end-user.

6 3) Pivot Why this matters to users For greater insight and to help them resolve anomalies they spot within their information, business users want to change the view of their data and see it cut different ways (e.g. by region, by time, by product). A good sales number can be bad when seen against competitors numbers, a seemingly bad productivity number can be good when seen in an historical context. Only the ability to pivot data along different dimensions gives this level of insight. Tool selection Drilling into data is necessary, but on its own it is not sufficient because context and comparison are also key to the decisionmaking process. Switching the view of data to see it broken down by different dimensions provides business users with vital insight into the wider context and is as key in a dashboard as it is in any other BI tool. Just as with drill many dashboard tools provide some form of pivot, typically in an ad-hoc OLAP grid style component. However, to allow dashboards to work naturally for business users, pivoting has to be an underlying capability of the data in the dashboard shared across components, not just a veneer implemented on the glass in the components themselves. The best interactive dashboard tools are underpinned by one or more cubes of data with data synchronized across multiple visual components. Only then can sophisticated data analyses be made available through zero-training interfaces.

7 4) Custom workflows By implementing custom workflows, business users gain a simple, intuitive way of performing more complex navigation of their data to answer multiple questions. This allows users to get in to their dashboards, get the information they need, get out and get on with their jobs as quickly as possible. Tool selection The majority of dashboard tools fall into two camps either they don t support custom workflows at all, or they do but require the dashboard designer to write code in order to implement them, turning dashboard development into a heavy duty (read: costly and time-consuming) programming exercise. Flexibility of drilling and pivoting comes at the cost of increased complexity, so in order to retain zero-training simplicity, the ability to encode custom workflows becomes essential. Custom workflows typically perform sophisticated manipulation and reorientation of the data but are encapsulated in the single tap or click of a button. The best interactive dashboard tools allow you to implement custom workflows without coding which means the BI Team (or even power users from the business) can create the type of rich, interactive dashboards that today s business users demand, quickly and cost-effectively. Why this matters to users Business users do not have the time to learn complex user interfaces for functionality they may only use intermittently.

8 5) Structured ad-hoc Why this matters to users Business users sometimes have second or third level questions which aren t answered by the default analyses built into the dashboard. Going back to the dashboard designer to request a new view of data takes time sometimes weeks even in the best of organizations. At the very least this breaks the end-user s train of thought and at the very worst they will be forced to make a decision without having the data they need to hand. With the ability to slice and dice the data within their dashboard, users can get to the information they need quickly and without requiring any training. No interactive dashboard can answer all the questions a user might ask. Perpetually having to release new versions of a dashboard to address every one-off analysis requested by business users consumes scarce design resources and leads to unwieldy, overly complex dashboards. Intuitive, in-context, structured ad-hoc analysis in dashboards provides the perfect answer to this and gives business users what they need when they need it. Tool selection Dashboard vendors typically say that ad-hoc analysis should be done in a different tool or they ll let the user launch an OLAP grid from the dashboard to provide unfettered access to all data in the underlying database. In both cases this is dis-jointed and typically requires extra user training. The best tools provide structured ad-hoc access from within the dashboard, allowing the user to slice and dice their data to quickly create an alternate view.

9 Summary The sole purpose of BI is to empower business users to make better-informed business decisions, and, for the non-analyst, interactive dashboards are the perfect way of delivering BI to meet this objective. A good interactive dashboard will implement each of the five layers from the interactive dashboard hierarchy of needs: Enabling structured ad-hoc analysis to answer occasional second and third level questions from within the dashboard, with no training required In fact, when a dashboard meets all of these criteria we d argue this is the only form of BI your business users will ever need, and at Antivia, we are 100% focused on helping organizations deliver this style of end-user BI, quickly and effectively. Providing visualizations which are both efficient and engaging Enabling synchronized drill across multiple components to maintain a consistent, intuitive view of data Allowing business users to pivot their data to see the wider context Implementing custom workflows to encapsulate sophisticated navigation and data re-orientation behind a simple business-labelled button

10 About Antivia Founded in 2007, Antivia is a business intelligence (BI) software company. Our flagship product, DecisionPoint enables nonprogrammers to create stunning interactive dashboards in minutes and share these with anyone on a web browser, tablet or smart phone. These dashboards can be used by front-line decision-makers without training to get answers to both their immediate and follow-up questions, ensuring the business information they need is always available at their fingertips. At Antivia we believe that BI needs to be designed for the business users in a business sales people, store managers, warehouse managers, executives, and call center team leaders the people who run the business on a day-to-day basis. These people need fingertip access to information to help them make informed decisions. They don t have time to wait for IT to get back to them with the latest figures and they are not analysts, so they don t have time to learn and master a Data Discovery tool. These people need something different. That something different is DecisionPoint. interactive dashboards, reports and BI applications for mobile devices and the desktop, with a no-coding interface that lets you produce the dashboards you need in minutes. These dashboards can be used by your front-line decision-makers without training and provides them with answers to both their immediate and follow-up questions, making sure the information they need is always available at their fingertips. We operate from offices in the United States and Europe and we re trusted by organizations both large and small across four continents, including 3M, Deutsche Bank, Honda, Shell, Shire Pharmaceuticals, The Coca-Cola Company, The NHS and Vodafone. DecisionPoint makes the vision of BI for everyone a reality. It is a next-generation BI tool that enables you to create stunning