building bi dashboards with sas

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D Copyright 2008 Dan McCreary & Associates 1

Building BI Dashboards withSAS Gauges and SAS BI Portal

Dan McCrearyPresident

Dan McCreary & [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

• 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

• 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• 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)

• Indicators can be customized to the preferences of a department, group, team or individual

F

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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 ArchitectureOperational

SourceSystems

Staging OLAP Cubes

NightlyReplication Fact Tables

ConformedDimensions

Metadata Registry

Metadata Web Services

Presentation

Portlet Portlet

Portlet Portlet

Web Portal

Excel

Flash

Dashboard

Semantic

Security

HTML

SASInformation

Maps

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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 real-time 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 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• Button• Curved Slider• Cylinders• Fancy Arrows• Gauge• Simple Tachometer• Dynamic Bullet Bar• Dynamic Dial• Dynamic Slider• Dynamic Speedometer• Dynamic Traffic Light

• 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

• Actual value is the horizontal black line• Target is vertical black line

Target ValueCurrent Value

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Dynamic Dial Meter

• The color of center of gauge is the current indicator value

Target Value

Current Value

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Dynamic Slider

• Color of triangle reflect the current value

Target ValueCurrent Value

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Dynamic Speedometer

• Great for people that like car gauges• Take up considerable screen real-estate

Target Value

Current Value

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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

• 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

Dashboard Portlets Indicator

Gauge TypeRangeMetric

1..N 1..1

1..11..1

1..1

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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-bullet-

bars-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 McCrearyPresidentDan McCreary & [email protected](952) 931-9198

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Thank You!

Please contact me for more information:• Enterprise Data Architecture• Business Intelligence• Data Warehouse• Metadata Management• Metadata Registries• Service Oriented Architectures• Semantic Web

Dan McCreary, PresidentDan McCreary & Associates

Metadata Strategy [email protected]

(952) 931-9198

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