Also, I think this is one of the main reasons many business analyst still use terrible 3D charts and the like in their dashboards. They will spend much time building a model, but view the chart as almost an afterthought. If they use the more gaudy charts in their Xcelcius dashboards, it is most likely because a middle manager asked them to so that they can impress upper management.

Middle management doesn’t mind using stripped down charts because things move so fast that they only care about the numbers (ie. their jobs), and it is not because they love the ideas of Tufte.

I just have come to the conclusion that it is a rare employee that actively seeks out information (on their own) and tries to really master their subject area. Just this week I was talking with one our our IT guys and he was amazed that I knew SQL. When I told him I was now learning the Python programming language, he had no idea what I was talking about. Our IT guy didn’t know what Python was!!! Most people begrudginly come to work, take coffee breaks, and then go home to watch American Idol.

Sincerely,

Jaded

Management likes pie.

Followed by hideous 3D pie charts that looked like the one you’re showing in the image of this post. The only positive was that they (mostly) did not present more than 4 data points in each pie… but still!

Sources: http://www.gantthead.com/video.cfm?ID=249216
presentation at http://www.gantthead.com/presentations/Scrum-in-the-Waterfall.html but requires subscription.

If the goal is to communicate a finding to a senior audience, don’t dally – tell them damned finding, what happened, why it happened, and what to do next. If anybody questions the analyses, the charts, tables, and regressions can be found in the appendix. And trust me: senior people will look at appendices if you’re telling them something they don’t already know or suspect.

If the goal is to drone on for 55 minutes about pageviews this and unique visitors that and conversion this, AND ON AND ON AND ON – all without real why’s or hypothesis or actions or a decision point – to a senior audience: you can kill them with charts. Go ahead. Drown them.

You’re right about precision delivering a false sense of comfort. You’re bang on.

There are good infometrics best practices. Developing a dashboard is in many ways more complex than building a website. We do have design patterns in infometrics, however, not all design patterns work in all cultures.

If you’re going to present a chart – follow the best practices. Start the axes at 0. Use bars for nominal and ordinal data, lines for interval. Label the axes. Label the chart.

Many insights can be communicated very well with 2 well selected series on a chart.

That’s my experience too… When they are able to make comparisons people become aware of how relevant charts can be if used as a decision-supporting tool.

“my next personal crusade in France” and you are doing a great job, but more on that later…

Consider the traditional McKinsey “Waterfall Chart” that explains how to get from situation A to situation B and pointing out which elements you can leverage on. When built, it usually reflects a lot of the “good practices” of information vizualisation and it is used in the decision making processes.

What is drastically missing, and in that respect I concur with the notion of illiterate Inertia, is the education of top management to good charts and its benefits to a business decision-making process.

In a recent assignment, we had to show the result of a new commercial organization design and show what the new sales teams activities would be like. I deliberately used a “Strip Chart” to show for each sales team how much contact each sales rep would have. This “bar-coding” style graph was greatly appreciated by the CEO which, after considering the first 3 slides (each discussing one of the sales team) told us he had never encountered such a graph before but found it the most pertinent graphical approach for this sizing of sales team issue. But once “educated” to the reading of the graph, it greatly helped him in his decision-making process.

We have a long way to go but I strongly advocate educating top managers to “better chart” based on real-world & real situations examples.

Adding that as part of your regular “Business MBA” courses is also essential as these guys will be tomorrow’s company managers. That would be my next personal crusade in France.