Cutting Hours from Dashboard and Report Development with an Information Universe Strategy
Read Time: 4 Minute Read
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This Week's TLDR
- Traditional dashboard and report cycles often lead to frustration and inefficiency
- Humans process visual information more effortlessly than numerical data
- By focusing on the strategic pairing of measures and dimensions, Spider Diagrams help avoid the common pitfalls
- Economical Cancer Screening, Video AI Game Rendering, AI Political Gobblygook
The Information Universe / Spider Diagram
The quest to perpetually optimize systems and processes often focuses on eliminating repetitive or frustrating iterations.
Over the years, I've honed in on those areas where my teams and I find ourselves stuck in what I dub the "undocumented cycle." These are cycles that, unlike their structured counterparts, lack visual diagrams, mentions in literature, and are often not considered at the outset of a project.
Consider the structured cycle of Scrum ceremonies.
The cycle of planning, implementation, review, and retrospective offers teams a clear framework, deriving from well-honed processes that enhance both velocity and team dynamics.
This is a cycle worth emulating.
However, not all cycles receive such widespread advocacy.
Take, for example, the dashboard report cycle prevalent in many organizations.
The process typically starts with a dashboard or report request. An analyst then makes an educated guess at the requirements, drafts a version, receives feedback, revises, and repeats.
After numerous iterations, stakeholders grow frustrated with delays and unmet needs, while the data team feels they're not making progress.
It's a classic case of spinning wheels.
Let's consider a way to break free from this cycle; constructing an information universe.
Humans excel at understanding visual representations and contextual situations. Despite what the "numbers people" might claim, visual diagrams require significantly fewer cognitive efforts to process and contextualize.
Good visuals are, simply put, easier to grasp.
The information universe serves as a graphical representation of the data stakeholders need to assess the business.
It acts as a meta-visual, helping those involved in dashboarding and reporting to communicate potential data insights before any heavy lifting begins.
This system highlights the core elements of a robust data repository:
- Measures (the quantitative business values).
- Dimensions (the qualitative or contextual information).
- The relationships between the two.
For example, a revenue measure is meaningless without the context provided by dimensions, such as time periods.
So how do you implement this juicy new system?
Enter the Spider Diagram.
This tool allows stakeholders to navigate between different dimensions quickly, identifying gaps before extensive data work begins.
It shifts the focus from tactical requests for numbers and slicers to strategic discussions about measure and dimension pairings.
Many organizations drown in measures while skimping on dimensions, limiting their analytical capabilities. Without dimensions like time, comparing periods or understanding trends becomes impossible.
Spider Diagrams, once created, can be applied across various projects, offering a lasting solution to the frequent data requests that teams face.
This approach not only streamlines the BI process but also fosters a more strategic perspective on data analytics.
With a tool like Miro (Used above) its pretty quick to build out something that can be easily shared with the team.
Give it a try.
News
- Advances in cancer screening, thanks to a economical little circuit board. A 5 dollar device for near real time breast cancer screening. Pharma will figure out a way to kill that I'm sure.
- Content generation, image generation, AND video generation! OpenAI is looking to do it all and SORA can render video games to boot.
- AI being tested against political "mis-information" (barf!). What happened to just reading multiple viewpoints and developing an opinion?
YTS Weekly Recommendation
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