Building on from a previous post Business Intelligence Data Visualisation - How to Confuse... I look into more detail about adding context to BI with a quick win - add textual descriptions to reports to tell a story.
I have all too often seen and indeed been involved in projects where wonderful
reports have been created; agonising over how to make sure the visualization that is being shown is as simple as it can be and then marveling at its beauty...
But could the proverbial "man off the street" understand it - almost
certainly not, they have no understanding of the business or the
context... however (the damning bit) could the "man off the department" it was designed for
understand it? I think we need to be telling more of a story when doing BI.
Have we emphasised too heavily on keeping reports clean,
and uncluttered that we have neglected to include the context for the
user to understand what they are looking at? Is it time for us to tell
a story jack a nory when presenting information?
- Would you see a newspaper article which only showed a headline and a figure? Well you might if you read some daily newspapers, but would you want to?
- Would you ever send an email to someone with just a value in it or a graph?
- Would you write a report with just a series of charts?
I
doubt
anyone would answer yes to these but in BI this is done all the
time. Remember at school being drilled to cover the who, what, where,
when, how (or similar) and to structure write ups to explain what you were trying to do, what you did, what you found?
To often in reports this is forgotten, there is no context background or story to explain
the
information - we are expecting the user to interpret what is being shown
- maybe fair enough but wasting their time having to understand where
a few succinct lines could really help is more valuable inn my eyes.
So the following structure would be better -
explaining what the report is (what information it delivers, description of the filters and where / when the data came from etc), then showing the report and
highlighting some of the pertinent points (nothing ground breaking -
top
10's, trends, other interesting reports). Dashboards definitely come
into their own here (lots of different views, links to people, docs,
etc) but again, all too often there is no story for the user to follow.
In our struggle to wrestle the most out of screen real estate, having
an intro to the report/section must be justified. Need to be careful that this is not just lip service
and just having drivel for the sake of it but
actual real business meaning and justification for the report - i.e.
what it shows and the benefits of the information as a simple example. This then means if
you are a frequent user you can still get the benefits but if you are a
new or infrequent user you can get up to speed quickly (and if you review printouts in a months / year time you know what it is. This feeds back into other previous posts about Social BI and BI Geo Mashups - it is all about the context, the story behind the information to reduce the time to interpret results to get at the actionable insight.
As always I would love to know your thoughts,
John