Basic understanding in Dashboard and Storyboard

A business intelligence dashboard is a data visualization technique that displays the current status and/or historical trends of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for an enterprise. Dashboards consolidate and arrange numbers, metricsand sometimes performance scorecards on a single screen. They may be tailored for a specific role and display metrics targeted for a single point of view or department. The essential features of a BI dashboard product include a customizable interface and the ability to pull real-time data from multiple sources. The latter is important since lots of people think dashboards are only on summarized data which is absolutely not the case.

A Dashboard

A business intelligence dashboard is a data visualization technique that displays the current status and/or historical trends of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for an enterprise. Dashboards consolidate and arrange numbers, metrics and sometimes performance scorecards on a single screen. They may be tailored for a specific role and display metrics targeted for a single point of view or department. The essential features of a BI dashboard product include a customizable interface and the ability to pull real-time data from multiple sources. The latter is important since lots of people think dashboards are only on summarized data which is absolutely not the case; dashboards consolidate data which may be of the lowest grain available! Key properties of a dashboard are:

• Simple and communicates easily and straight
• Minimum distractions, since these could cause confusion
• Supports organized business with meaning, insights and useful data or information
• Applies human visual perception to visual presentation of information: colors play a significant role here
• Limited interactivity: filtering, sorting, what-if scenarios, drill down capabilities and sometimes some self-service features
• They are often “managed” in a sense that the dashboards are centrally developed by ICT, key users or a competence center, and they are consumed by the end-users
• Offer connectivity capabilities to other BI components for providing more detail. Often these are reports with are connected via query-parsing to the dashboards

A Storyboard

Is there a big difference between a storyboard and a dashboard? Mwah, not too much: they both focus on communicating key – consolidated – information in a highly visualized and way which ultimately leaves little room for misinterpretation. For both the same key words apply: simple, visual, minimum distraction.

The main difference between a dashboard and a storyboard is that the latter is fully interactive for the end user. The interactivity of the storyboard is reflected through capabilities for the end user to:

• Sort
• Filter data: include and exclude data
• Change chart or graph types on the fly
• Add new visualizations on the fly; store and share them
• Drill down
• Add or adjust calculated measures and dimensions
• Add new data via wrangling, blending or joining
• Adjust the full layout of the board
• Create custom hierarchies or custom groupings
• Allow for basic data quality improvements (rename, concatenate, upper and lower case etc)

Another big difference between dashboards and storyboards is that storyboards are self-service enabled boards meaning the end user creates them him/herself. Opposite to dashboards that are typically “managed” and as such are created centrally by ICT, key users or a BICC, and are consumed by the end user.