An interesting comparison might be found in the form of ancient store cairns found throughout many countries including Scotland, Ireland, Tibet, and the Arctic. These sculptures were often created as directional markers pointing the way home or to safety built by those who had been down a path, to mark the way for others to follow.
Gather Your Stones
To build a Cairn, one gathers up a variety of colors and shapes of rocks; nicely smoothed and rounded rocks — or a more ragged variety. For a dashboard, it is important to realize that each organization will have its own business need and corporate culture, meaning that what is effective to include in a dashboard for one organization may not work well for another. Identifying and selecting the proper metrics, providing the right level of detail to end users, and making sure the information is timely, are all aspects that must be considered when deciding on which metrics should be used in the construction of a dashboard.
Clean Off the Rocks
The rocks you have collected for your cairn should be cleaned by rinsing and scrubbing them to rid the stones of dirt and bugs and expose their true beauty. When constructing a dashboard, it is of great importance that your data be accepted as reliable and accurate. Be sure to verify the data source, scheduled availability and format. You may have to “clean” your data before it will be usable. Consider what cleansing methods may be available and appropriate for use.
Pile Them Up
Begin piling up. The beauty of the cairn is in the balancing of the rocks. For a natural cairn no glue will be used, so play around with the shapes and balances of your stones. Once you have chosen which metrics to include in your dashboard, you will have to determine how to visualize that information. The types of visualizations that are the most effective may be different depending upon the metric. Most importantly to keep in mind is that you can use different types of visualizations for different metrics within the same dashboard – use what best fits. Some common visualization formats currently include gauges, bullet and bar charts, maps even some embedded reports.
If Necessary, Use Glue
Once you get the hang of building a simple cairn you may want to create taller and more balanced towers. In these cases, you may need to use hot glue or epoxy appropriate for concrete and stone. After your basic dashboard is in place, you may want to consider integration with various external systems to make data available in real-time, include additional metrics or allowing drill-down to supporting information. This may require the use of specific conduits to link your dashboard to data marts, general ledger systems or other data sources.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt that dashboards are a valuable tool in an organization’s technology arsenal, but many continue to be challenged with what I’ve mentioned here: what data to include, where that data resides and what is required to make it usable, which format is most effective for presentation and finally, after a simple dashboard implementation, what’s next?
If the basics are followed during initial planning and construction I think the results will be a functional and valuable work of art!
Business is alone a power.
Meaning of Statistics: The science of producing unreliable facts from reliable figures.