A month ago I
posted
about the necessity of sharing ideas in the BI world. I really think
that if we all share our smart ideas then we'll be better in our work.
I
want to show you a work I finished few weeks ago. I'm very proud of
this work as it will be in the desktop of our CEO and I got many
compliments for it.
Note that what you see in the picture is not the
real screenshot of the work (It's much more beautiful in the
reality...). There's a problem getting out screenshots out of my
company, so I did a sketch in Power Point.
This is the functionality of the leds map (my design, if you have any comments):
- The leds map is simply a web site, meaning zero-footprint in the
client's computer. Some computers in my company has java compatibility
problems, so I added a parameter you can send with the site's URL which
changes the applet's java version (see more in the next post, which
will be more technical).
- The leds map has to be small, about a quarter of the screen. That's because it's intended to be a part of the CEO's desktop.
- When the map loads, a picture with a turning-around The Thinker statue is shown with a "Loading" message below (our CEO loves that statue...).
- After the map has been loaded, the user sees two axis with the
leds in them. The two axis can represent any Meta-Measures you'd like:
Short-Term Profit Vs. Long-Term Profit, Client's Satisfaction Vs.
Company's Profit, etc. This is a point that many people have difficulty
to understand, so I'll give an example: The yellow led is in the
top-right corner, so that says that the underlying measure is very
important in both the meta-measures. Going on with the example, that
says that this measure is very important for theClient's Satisfaction and for the Company's Profit. Note that the leds never move. Only their color changes.
- When you move the cursor on a measure in the map, a small tooltip
appears next to it. The tooltip shows the measure's name and its value
(You can see it in the left-bottom led). Design Change: As my team master recommended, now each led has its measure's name above it. The tooltip shows only the value.
- When the map loads, only the red leds are shown. In the top-left
corner of the screen, there's three radio buttons which filters the
shown leds by their colors. In the picture, all the leds are shown
because all the radio buttons are enabled.
- Clicking on a measure on the map drills-down to the different department's leds, as you can see in the left side of the picture.
- Clicking on a department's led makes the map to vanish and
instead of it there's a drill-down of the department, meaning that the
measures of its sub-departments are shown instead of the map.
- After the last drill-down was made, there are two possible
actions: Close the new view and return to the map or open the new view
in full screen, where you can slice-and-dice and play with the data.
In the next post I'll describe how the leds map was built using the Panorama SDK.