"Dundas Consulting did a fantastic job and was able to deliver the final project in two weeks, as planned. We were particularly impressed with the responsiveness of our consultant, as well as his willingness to share his opinions about our needs. Since this was our first dashboard application, we appreciated his candor and experience - especially on the subject of user interfaces."

Mitesh Patel
Executive Technology Director, TMX Communications

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Our Methodology

A Guide To Dashboard Creation

Step Five: Bringing It All Together

With all the issues in mind and all the decisions made, we have all the necessary components, including a data access layer, business logic and a presentation layer (the actual visualization), which consumes the "massaged" business logic.  It's time to call the client again and merge the remaining elements.

The biggest issue when bringing it all together is that you really don't know what the dashboard is going to look like until you've actually hooked it up to the data - and you usually don't do that until the end.  You'll have an idea of what the values are going to be, but you won’t know for sure until it’s actually feeding back real data.  This can be very satisfying or it can leave you scratching your head, if you've missed something important.  For example, if you have two series on a chart with the same vertical axis and one has values ranging from 100,000 to 200,000 and your second line ranges between 10 and 250, well, you've got a problem: You won’t be able to see the line with the 10 to 250 values because the scale of the vertical axis is tremendously larger (see Fig 1.0 & Fig 1.1). You must take another look at the chart and/or data.  This is a typical example of some of the challenges in the final process - you may have to revisit some visualization techniques because of the way the actual data is coming back.

Conclusion

Creating custom digital dashboards is always a rewarding project, once the visualization techniques, end-user considerations and technical implementations have all been worked out.  Knowing which types of visualization components work best with a particular type of data - and utilizing industry-standard data visualization techniques - helps Dundas clients be assured that their new dashboards will assist them in making better business decisions based on what they see in their data.

About the Author

Alexander Chiang leads the Consulting Services Department for Dundas Data Visualization Inc. He has advised a variety of Fortune 100 companies on the technology platforms and tools that best fit their dashboard requirements. His many years of user interface design and his expertise in data visualization techniques have enabled him to facilitate effective software solutions for the broader BI community.