Building BI Dashboards with
SAS Gauges and SAS BI Portal
Dan McCreary
President
Dan McCreary & Associates
[email protected]
(952) 931-9198
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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
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Objectives
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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
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Dashboard Benefits
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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
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The Auto Dashboard
• The auto reference model
• Dummy lights “check engine”
• No drill down
Gas “Indicator”
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Gas Gauge and Warning Range
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• 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)
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• Indicators can be customized to
the preferences of a department,
group, team or individual
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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
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Sample SAS BI Architecture
Operational
Source
Systems
Staging
Nightly
Replication
OLAP Cubes
Presentation
Web Portal
Fact Tables
Portlet
Portlet
Portlet
Portlet
Semantic
Security
Conformed
Dimensions
SAS
Information
Maps
Excel
Flash
Dashboard
HTML
Metadata Web Services
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Metadata Registry
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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 realtime requirements (see Dan for ROI spreadsheet)
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Sample Dashboard
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SAS Graph as a Portlet Generator
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Steven Few Example with SAS Graph
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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
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Scorecard Standards
• Note that there
are three data
values and four
ranges
Threshold
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Target
Stretch
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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
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SAS BI Range Registry
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Creating a New Range Item
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SAS Gauge Types
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Button
Curved Slider
Cylinders
Fancy Arrows
Gauge
Simple Tachometer
Dynamic Bullet Bar
Dynamic Dial
Dynamic Slider
Dynamic Speedometer
Dynamic Traffic Light
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Marked Dial
Pointers
Reversed Tachometer
Simple Arrows
Simple Dial
Slider
Solid Tachometer
Traffic Light
Stylized Slider
Stylized Tachometer
Arrows
Vertical Slider
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Dynamic Bullet Bar
Current Value
Target Value
• Actual value is the horizontal black line
• Target is vertical black line
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Dynamic Dial Meter
Current Value
Target Value
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• The color of center of gauge is the current
indicator value
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Dynamic Slider
Current Value
Target Value
• Color of triangle reflect the current value
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Dynamic Speedometer
Current Value
Target Value
• Great for people that like car gauges
• Take up considerable screen real-estate
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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
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Logical Model for BI Dashboards
Dashboard
Portlets
1..N
1..1
Metric
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1..1
Indicator
1..1
1..1
Range
Gauge Type
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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
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Agility
• The business determines the metric to
measure and the expected values:
– target
– threshold
– stretch
• Use range values from the range value
registry
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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
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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)
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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-bulletbars-with-goog.html
• SAS Training
– SAS BI Portal
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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
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Performance Dashboards
• Performance Dashboards:
Measuring, Monitoring,
and Managing Your
Business.
• Wayne W Eckerson
• John Wiley & Sons 2006
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Wikipedia References
• Dashboards (management information
systems)
• Business Intelligence
• Balanced scorecard
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Questions?
Dan McCreary
President
Dan McCreary & Associates
[email protected]
(952) 931-9198
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Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates
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Thank You!
Please contact me for more information:
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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
[email protected]
(952) 931-9198
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Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates
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