on 19 Dec 2016 07:30:27
Whilst presenting numerical data is important, different users in the organization need additional information to fully understand the context. For more senior management, the commentary around the number is equally important as the raw number itself. When reporting to management, the users almost want to provide answers to the questions they expect their manager to ask, before being directly asked.
Consider a KPI tile, which shows a number which shows monthly sales targets were not achieved...bad result. The first question the manager will ask is why? So imagine a KPI tile which provide commentary on why the sales targets were not met on the "back" or as a dashboard "tooltip".
The user would provide commentary such as, "July sales targets were not achieved due to a strike at the distributers, reducing the volume of stock available in stores" and this commentary would be shown as part of the KPI tile.
When the manager clicked on the "more info" icon, the tile spins around to shown the comment on the back of the tile, or a tooltip pops up adjacent to the KPI tile to display the comments.
To further enhance the functionality, consider making the contextual commentary dynamic, that is, have the commentary stored in a multi-dimension matrix that is aligned with the filters used on the report. That way, the commentary is dynamically "looked-up" based on the chosen filters, driving the selection of the appropriate range within the matrix.
This would be an extremely powerful way to report up into an organisation through a hierarchy, allowing each level in the hierarchy to summarise or consolidate the comments of their direct reports, providing succinct commentary to their managers.