Altek Solutions Business Intelligence Blog | Archive

Performance Management

Underwhelm Your Users with a Well-designed Dashboard

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Dashboard and visualizations are a hot topic right now. You can’t go to an SAP BusinessObjects event or a user group meeting without seeing over half of the presentations focusing on dashboards and visualizations. And, like with any cutting-edge technology, it seems everyone is trying to get in on the action. While that’s a good thing, sometimes people lack the basic knowledge and skills to utilize those tools to deliver effective analysis.

Making Your Measures Behave

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

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Defining measures gets interesting because while they are tied to a high-level corporate goal, they also touch nearly every other aspect of the organization, making it a challenge sometimes to balance all of the competing interests. Plus, as soon as you start converting their behavior into numbers, people will simple adapt their behavior to have good numbers and may not deliver the overall results you had hoped.

How to Alienate 12% of your Audience Without Even Trying

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

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How to Alienate 12% of your Audience Without Even Trying

I’m color-blind. I can see colors, just not the same way the majority of you do. I didn’t write this post to complain about my color-blindness. Rather, now that dashboards and data visualization continue to become more wide-spread, we’ve got a few issues to talk about.

In Search of Clarity

Friday, March 12, 2010

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Our customers typically have mountains of data, spanning all areas of the organization. Some of their data spans decades. They look to us to help them make sense of it all, and utilize that information to drive better decision-making. It’s often a challenge not so much from a technology aspect, but from a human one. Sometimes when we ask an executive which metrics are most important to them, we get the reply “all of them”.