Learning Best Practices From The 5 Worst... Analysis and Visualization.
We've been doing this software thing for a while now! 10 years ago Northcraft Analytics was formed when John Cullom (CTO, CEO and my brother) built our first product for IT Analytics. It was for BMC Remedy ITSM and we sold it to our first customer in California. Exciting times! I still remember getting the purchase order. Now John had started an analytics company just prior to Northcraft with a powerful analytics product, but no sales team, in the wrong industry at the wrong time. Personally, I had enough of selling the worst product on the ITSM market (not Remedy) in a very hot space, where ServiceNow simply laid waste to every competitor in its path. So, it was time for me to get out of ITSM (my home market for 12 years at that point) and join Northcraft full time in 2011, leaving the big vendors behind to bring our brainchild into the world. It was a bit terrifying (possibly more for my wife raising our children, with temporary Cobra healthcare). We've now completed countless implementations world-wide of 40+ analytics modules in our ITSM and ITOM suite which go way beyond the early BMC Remedy ITSM days. And, last night I was having a little bird dog (just love the name), looking back over the past years thinking about all of the great implementations... and difficult ones. I'm one of those people that can make myself laugh. What got me going? Terrible, and I mean awful dashboards, reports and visualizations.
I should say, there are always limitations in any implementation based on politics, technology stack, people, budget and time, so I've been careful to choose a top offender list based on a careful consideration of the above... but mainly for fun and not necessarily any certain order.
#1 - The Eye Chart
Yes, this was on an actual CIO dashboard. And, let me tell you buddy... this is a massive and recognizable organization. The person that made this definitely knows ITIL... and they jammed all of that knowledge into 1 matrix that simultaneously presents all of the metrics one could ever want to know about a change request, without learning anything at all. So many things wrong with this one. There will be no confidence in data quality, because you can't drill into it. It's very difficult to read. We don't know who is working on it the request, what was unsuccessful, and if it was tied to some sort of critical service... nothing! But, we do get a headache and the feeling that the person that made this is brilliant, but might lack common sense. It's also possible that the CIO really asked for it? I mean this was in production with his/her approval. One is left wondering.
#2 - Information Overload
So, this one is better than the first, because you do have decent information on the report, just too much of it. If you were to scroll down some 100 pages in this Excel sheet, you would see a lovely variety of Change metrics. Problem #2 is that this bad boy doesn't just have 10,000 rows, but it will soon have 10,000 columns. Why you ask? Well, let me ask you a question. Do you see in that lovely little peach header? Is that the month? It is. If this miserable "Dashboard" were ever to continue past 2012 (thankfully it never did), it would go on for eternity, with the passage of old man time. May I add also that the collaboration capabilities of Excel are somewhat limited? Northcraft actually does fix that, but the world has moved on to PowerBI and Tableau.
#3 - Oh Yeah, I'm Going There...
Ok, Malcolm Fry is an industry legend. And what an incredible presenter, funny and brilliant. But, I think I first knew he was close to retirement when I saw this little diddy. First of all, don't get me started on the color scheme, but this dashboard concept suffers from the exact opposite of #2, this is information underload. In addition, I mean, hey, I like CSFs tied to KPIs too but -- "Number and Percentage of Incidents Resolved without Impact To the Business."
Ok, wait a second, did you just tell me that the KPI is 2 KPIs? A number and a percentage? And, don't you think I would want to drill-down on the Incidents that DO have impact to the business? So, let's just strip the Percentage because it will be tiny. Then, keep it to Number of Incidents That Impact The Business. Or, better yet, Number of Business-Impacting Incidents (Simple). There. C'mon Malcolm! What happened to the glory days? The CMDB book? That was hot. You were on top then!
#4 - Let's Do It In The Tool.
Sweet mother. I know that you invested $1.864M in an enterprise application, so you've got to use what you have, right? Ok, so here's the deal. That's an OLTP system. It's designed to do something that isn't OLAP. Vendor X had to make fundamental design choices in the data model design that make for a poor OLAP system. It's fine! That's their core business. Now, can they scramble around and acquire something that does analysis? Sure they can, but do you really think that BMC, Salesforce, ServiceNow, HP/Microfocus, IBM, Intuit or CA want you to have software that plays nice with your other systems? Or, might they possibly believe that their application(s)/platform(s)/suite(s) will be the only thing running the entirety of IT forever? Anyway, do you see the "Business Elapsed Percentage" column there in the figure directly above? Does that number look right? Just forget it Vendor X. Go write more apps, it's different than analysis.
#5 - Poor Analysis Choices
The visualizations above aren't terrible, plus you do have a decent use of the landscape with one screen, where different time periods can be selected on the fly with the corresponding months. However, when you do a time series analysis, it simply must be 13 months of data (which would be possible if you moved it to the bottom). 4 months may fit on the screen, but if I can't look at a KPI for today and compare it to the same day of week last year, it's a problem. A bonus would be to show a nice comparison widget with the variance percentage and a count for the previous time period vs. current. Next, the pie chart is useless in a situation where you have too many categories in a series... and this isn't even sorted, so that's a mess. Pie charts are great when you have 10 items or less. This is not the place for it. Finally, where's the drilling?
Anyway, I might need to make this a series, because there is so much content to review and criticize. It turned out to be much more fun than I originally had planned! So, look out for part two one day when I get around to it. I think I might just call it... "How to Excel in Visualizations with PowerBI." Mmmmm, that might be a bit too assy-kissy to Microsoft. How about... "Your Visualizations TaBLOW!" or... "A Blognos on How to Not Suck with Cognos." or... ok, never mind, I'm done. If you have 6 more minutes, enjoy our new CTO Paul Summerfield launching our latest offering for SolarWinds. Thanks for reading!
Experienced CXO Executive
6 年Max - How are you? Hope all is well!
Global Executive Recruiter ~ Leadership Coach
6 年Story telling with a sense of humor is the best way to your point across. Well done!
Partner @ Carmichael Consulting Solutions | CRO
6 年It takes time to build a brand name. With our first offering in the PowerBI store, we'll be one step closer to that. It's happening. We're still convinced that it's better to never take.on VC even if you could grow more quickly. And, we just had another competitive replacement last month that makes us certain. Anyway, thanks Jill J.!
Great article Lee! You know how I feel!!! In fact, I was just talking about you guys to our new Sr VP of infrastructure.....told him how you could solve all our issues! ??