Datasheet

These are all questions you need answered when negotiating development
time, refresh intervals, and phasing.
Conventional wisdom says that the measures on your dashboard shouldn’t
be governed by the availability of data. Instead, you should let dashboard
KPIs and measures govern the data sources in your organization. Although
I agree with the spirit of that statement, I’ve been involved in too many
dashboard projects that have fallen apart because of lack of data. Real-world
experience has taught me the difference between the ideal and the ordeal.
If your organizational strategy requires that you collect and measure data
that is nonexistent or not available, press pause on the dashboard project
and turn your attention to creating a data collection mechanism that will get
the data you need.
Define the dimensions and
filters for the dashboard
In the context of reporting, a dimension is a data category used to organize
business data. Examples of dimensions are Region, Market, Branch, Manager,
or Employee. When you define a dimension in the user requirements stage
of development, you’re determining how the measures should be grouped
or distributed. For example, if it’s determined that your dashboard should
report data by employee, you need to ensure that your data collection and
aggregation processes include employee detail. As you can imagine, adding a
new dimension after the dashboard is built can get complicated, especially
when your processes require many aggregations across multiple data
sources. The bottom line is that locking down the dimensions for a dash-
board early in the process definitely saves you headaches.
Along those same lines, you want to get a clear sense of the types of filters
that are required. In the context of dashboards, filters are mechanisms that
allow you to narrow the scope of the data to a single dimension. For example,
you can filter on Year, Employee, or Region. Again, if you don’t account for a
particular filter while building your dashboarding process, you’ll likely be
forced into an unpleasant redesign of both your data collection processes
and your dashboard.
If you’re confused by the difference between dimensions and fields, think
about a simple Excel table. A dimension is like a column of data (such as a
column containing employee names) in an Excel table. A filter, then, is the
mechanism that allows you to narrow your table to show only the data for
a particular employee. For example, if you apply Excel’s AutoFilter to the
employee column, you are building a filter mechanism into your table.
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Chapter 1: Getting in the Dashboard State of Mind
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