A presentation I gave to a group of BAs that were gathering business requirements for an enterprise Businss Intelligence project based on SAS. You can also see some of my blogging on creating bullet bars with Google Charts.

1. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 1 Building BI Dashboards withSAS Gauges and SAS BI Portal Dan McCreary President Dan McCreary & Associates dan@danmccreary.com (952) 931-9198

2. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 2 About this Presentation Designed for a group of BAs that were gathering requirements for a enterprise BI system Focus on gathering precise requirements for information dashboard design using SAS BI tools

3. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 3 Objectives What are BI Dashboards? How are they related to SAS scorecards? How are they managed in SAS? List Gauge Types Give Report Specification Developers a Single Reference Card

4. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 4 Dashboard Benefits Visual presentation of performance measures Ability to identify and correct negative trends Measure efficiencies/inefficiencies Ability to generate detailed reports showing new trends Ability to make more informed decisions based on collected business intelligence Align strategies and organizational goals Save time over running multiple reports

5. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 5 The Auto Dashboard The auto reference model Dummy lights “check engine” No drill down Gas “Indicator”

6. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 6 Gas Gauge and Warning Range The arrow is the “current value” The gauge has a “warning range” In cars you can not customized the range to your risk preference (1/4, 1/8, 1/16 of a tank) Indicators can be customized to the preferences of a department, group, team or individual F E

7. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 7 Terms Dashboard – a collection of “portlets” Portlet – a region of a portal page JSR-168 – a standard for displaying portlets in any vendors portal Indicator – a way to describe a metric with a set of known values Gauge Type – a specific type of indicator such as a dial or bar

8. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 8 Sample SAS BI Architecture Conformed Dimensions OperationalSourceSystems Staging OLAP Cubes Presentation Web Portal NightlyReplication Fact Tables Portlet Portlet Semantic Portlet Portlet Security SASInformation Maps Excel Flash Dashboard HTML Metadata Web Services Metadata Registry

9. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 9 Data Freshness 95% of the time a user can do analysis from data created from aggregates in the OLTP cube Aggregates are created each night Make sure your users understand that real-time data on the operational source systems will need special processing Add an appropriate budgeting factor for any real-time requirements (see Dan for ROI spreadsheet)

10. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 10 Sample Dashboard

11. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 11 SAS Graph as a Portlet Generator

12. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 12 Steven Few Example with SAS Graph

13. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 13 About SAS 9.2 SAS 9.2 does not have native support for JSR-168 portlets SAS 9.3 (due January 2009) will have better JSR-168 compliance For this 2008 our goals will be to use the SAS portal tools within the SAS portal alone 2009 will focus on Portlet portability

14. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 14 Scorecard Standards Note that there are three data values and four ranges Threshold Target Stretch

15. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 15 Warning on the Semantics of the Word “Target” Most systems define the word “target” as a specific numeric value that a metric should be aspiring to or the goal value of an organization for a metric Some non-standard systems (eg Thrivent) define “target” define target as a point between the yellow and the green areas of an indicator Use precise words in your requirements Target Goal Value Yellow/Green Separation Value

16. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 16 SAS BI Range Registry

17. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 17 Creating a New Range Item

18. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 18 SAS Gauge Types Button Curved Slider Cylinders Fancy Arrows Gauge Simple Tachometer Dynamic Bullet Bar Dynamic Dial Dynamic Slider Dynamic Speedometer Dynamic Traffic Light Marked Dial Pointers Reversed Tachometer Simple Arrows Simple Dial Slider Solid Tachometer Traffic Light Stylized Slider Stylized Tachometer Arrows Vertical Slider

19. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 19 Dynamic Bullet Bar Current Value Target Value Actual value is the horizontal black line Target is vertical black line

20. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 20 Dynamic Dial Meter Current Value Target Value The color of center of gauge is the current indicator value

21. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 21 Dynamic Slider Current Value Target Value Color of triangle reflect the current value

22. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 22 Dynamic Speedometer Current Value Target Value Great for people that like car gauges Take up considerable screen real-estate

23. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 23 Dynamic Stoplight Display a simple color to indicate the status of a metric Sometimes a simple design is the best Note that some people are color-blind and will need more than color to show a value

24. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 24 Logical Model for BI Dashboards Dashboard Portlets Indicator 1..N 1..1 1..1 1..1 1..1 Gauge Type Range Metric Portals have many dashboards Dashboards have many portlets Some portlets are associated with an indicator Indicators display some metric that the user wants to measure and compares that metric with expected values Some indicator use SAS Gauges Gauges can reference a library of colors from a range item

25. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 25 Agility The business determines the metric to measure and the expected values: target threshold stretch Use range values from the range value registry

26. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 26 Process Gather business requirements about what values are relevant for your group Read up on dashboard design and dashboard presentation concepts Create prototypes for users Review with usability team for “sanity check” Build system on test environment Migrate to production

27. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 27 Other to Build Rapid Prototypes Use Prototypes to gauge users reactions and to do basic dashboard layouts Use Microsoft Excel and charts Use Google Charts (REST)

28. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 28 Resources Books How to display (Steven Few) What to measure (Wayne Eckerson) Blogs Dan McCreary on Bullet Bars with Google Charts http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/11/creating-bullet-bars-with-goog.html SAS Training SAS BI Portal

29. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 29 Information Dashboard Design Information Dashboard Design Steven Few O’Reilly 2006 Excellent guide for the dashboard designer Focus on usability Based on actual studies of pattern recognition

30. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 30 Performance Dashboards Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. Wayne W Eckerson John Wiley & Sons 2006

31. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 31 Wikipedia References Dashboards (management information systems) Business Intelligence Balanced scorecard

32. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 32 Questions? Dan McCreary President Dan McCreary & Associates dan@danmccreary.com (952) 931-9198

33. Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 33 Thank You! Please contact me for more information: Enterprise Data Architecture Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Metadata Management Metadata Registries Service Oriented Architectures Semantic Web Dan McCreary, President Dan McCreary & Associates Metadata Strategy Development dan@danmccreary.com (952) 931-9198