Designing Dashboards for Situation Awareness

January 21, 2009 Dashboards 1 Comment

The level of awareness an individual has for a situation – of knowing what is going on at any one time and how it fits into or impacts the overall system. Effective dashboards increase situational awareness but the danger of fixation on the measure, rather than the meaning and impact can overwhelm the advantage to sometimes disasterous results.

A well documented case by Endsley, Bolte and Jones [2003] tells of how a myopic focus on monitoring resulted in an airplane being flown into a mountain side whilst pilots argued about the cause of a flashing light. In fact 88% of human error in aircraft crashes are the result of poor situational awareness. The other 12% is through poor decision making or poor execution. Whilst the pilots were seen to do their job correctly, they were unable to readily access the information behind the dashboard indication.

Yet little attention is given to ensuring that situational awareness is a factor in dashboard design and integration of such BI tools into processes. The primary reasons given for this are:

  • Executive dashboards are too generic and role specific to benefit from SA based development
  • Operational dashboards are too costly to develop incorporating iterative SA practices

However, 50 SA dashboard design guidelines have been developed by Endsley, divided into 6 categories:

  1. Organize information around goals – for instance, with pilots, the amount of gas is not important in itself, but in terms of ability to reach the destination with required fuel reserves and below landing fuel weight, based on the current environmental conditions is what is important to the pilot.
  2. Directly support comprehension – indicate relative importance of different measures, their target values and deviation parameters
  3. Support global SA – specific goals should be viewed in context of the overall picture
  4. Context driven alerts – only include threshold alerts where important for the current task
  5. Make context changes apparent – alerts received must be done in a context that provides awareness of a new situation
  6. Use projections – trend information helps users create a mental model of future behavior

Two other factors that impact SA when using dashboards are the users confidence in the data viewed and the complexity of the design of the dashboard. For more on BI Dashboards

Businesses Must Face Reality or Lose Prosperity

January 12, 2009 BI Strategy No Comments

I thought the following extract from a speech given by USA president elect Barak Obama was interesting in its parallel to the adoption of new ways of thinking and making decisions in business:

“It’s time, once again, we put science at the top of our agenda” …. “The truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources it’s about protecting free and open inquiry and it’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology. It’s about listening to what our scientists have to say even when it’s inconvenient. Especially when it’s inconvenient. Because the highest purpose of science is the search for knowledge, truth and a better understanding of the world around us. That will be my goal as President of the United States.”

It is these very principles – seeking knowledge to gain a better understanding of our customers and their worlds, as well as new ways of doing business and new product technology that drives my passion for business intelligence. BI is about breaking down the barriers of protective egos, outdated or incorrect assumptions and releasing the reality of past performance and future presight so that we may avoid the comfort of our own delusions.

This environment is very uncomfortable for many, as is change in general. But inspite of the inconvenience of change, and the discomfort of the truth, this is the new way forward for businesses. It is one of the most power releasing business capabilities that has been introduced since the adoption of the Internet. Can you imagine doing business today without email, without access to the vast knowledge of the web, without broadband….and all the other everyday business conveniences we now take for granted. Yet there are still many senior business people lacking in www search skills, who cannot type at a reasonable speed, who resist using software of any kind – because learning how to master these tools is both inconvenient and uncomfortable. Accepting that some of these skills are not required as much at C-level, there is little room in business today for such individuals who resist business evolution. Such mentality is largely responsible for wiping 486/500 businesses from the Fortune 500 over the past 35 years.