# Decisions, Decisions - Dashboards and Reports --- >[!Note] Goal >This note is about designing dashboards, communicating scope and business evolution based visualisation improvements. >- Prepare the right kind of dashboard >- Empower stakeholders with interactivity >- Make dashboard mockups >- Tableau for data visualisation >- Design dashboards and visualisations >- Make trade-offs >- Pre-aggregate data >- Design and organise charts >- Edit and adapt >- Communicate with stakeholders ```toc ``` ## Data Visualisation in Business Intelligence *A graphical representation of data* A BI visualisation tracks, or monitors, data that is relevant to an ongoing business question. Sometimes this means its built for data that might not even exist yet. BI visualisations are usually dynamic. The goal of a BI dashboard is to **empower users to interpret the data on their own** ### Types of Dashboards Often, BI professionals will tailor a dashboard for a specific purpose. The three most common categories are: - **Strategic**: focuses on long-term goals and strategies at the highest level of metrics - **Operational:** tracks short-term performance and intermediate goals - **Analytical:** consists of the datasets and the mathematics used in these sets #### Strategic Dashboards A wide range of businesses use strategic dashboards when evaluating and aligning their strategic goals. These dashboards provide information over the longest time frame—from a single financial quarter to years. They typically contain information that is useful for enterprise-wide decision-making. For example, a strategic dashboard could on key performance indicators over a year. ![[strategic_dashboard.png]] #### Operational Dashboards Operational dashboards are arguably the most common type of dashboard. Because these dashboards contain information on a time scale of days, weeks, or months, they can provide performance insight almost in real-time. This enables businesses to track and maintain their immediate operational processes *in light of* their strategic goals. An operational dashboard could focus on customer service team performance. ![[operational_dashboards.png]] #### Analytical Dashboards Analytic dashboards contain the details involved in the use, analysis, and predictions made by data scientists. Data science teams usually create and maintain the most technical category, analytic dashboards. An example of an analytic dashboard could focus on metrics for a company’s financial performance. ![[analytical_dashboards.png]] ## Producing Dashboards 1. A stakeholder describes their needs 2. A BI professional follows up with questions 1. What's the dash supposed to do? 2. What KPIs and dimensions is it tracking? 3. Who is the dash being built for? 4. Where is the necessary data? 5. How far back in time should the dash go? 3. Create a dashboard mockup - A simple draft of a visualisation that is used for planning a dashboard and evaluating its progress 1. Diagrams 2. Iteration (involve stakeholders) Avoid complexity and confusion Google Data Studio is all about simplicity How can you represent data in the most effective way? - Trade-offs As a BI professional, you will want to create visualization tools that are self-explanatory so that stakeholders can use them to answer their own questions instead of depending on you—which is why thinking about how you are using these elements is so important.