KPI Collections and Metrics Themes
Massive systems produce massive amounts of metrics. The challenge of business intelligence is to figure out how to slice and present the data in ways that benefit the user rather than confuse them. We’ve all seen situations where users get inundated with out-of-context numbers that do worse than confuse - they mislead and alarm.
The answer lies in information architecture, of course. Categorization of the information must be done from the user’s point of view.
New York City has gone out of its way to organize the performance metrics available to track the performance of its many agencies. The city has organized its KPIs by what they call “themes”. A great idea. Here is the diagram they display to people interested in NYC citywide performance metrics. They ask you to indicate a theme, or area of interest as follows:
Nothing to it, you say. “It’s obvious”. Well, if it were obvious, why do we still see those dropdowns with hundreds of values to choose from?
By using navigation to split users and find out their intentions, we can limit field choices to a reasonable level once they get to the data request form page.
Here is the link to the New York City Citywide Performance Reporting application.
I find the parallel between this and SimCity’s various dashboarding is interesting.