The HIVECELL

Since my early forays into Business Intelligence and decision making tools I have been frustrated as it relates to cost and how they missed the point on conveying the story in the language of the user.

In the end leaders need to make decisions quickly and effectively.   Most tools since the beginning have busied the screen with graphs and numbers providing lots  of content with little context.   Only after extended exposure to a set of dashboards can a decision maker start to makes sense of context to provide context.   This takes a great deal of time and can be an exercise in mental gymnastics

The examples of this are everywhere, from our cars to our boardrooms to our control rooms.   Having said this, I have been obsessed with solving this paradox for decades with very little success till now.  

The graphic below demonstrates how to effectively provide decision making context across many domains consistently and effectively.

 

The Hive Cell 

The hivecell represents 15 data points. One HiveCell provides context for one Domain. A domain may be revenue or cost or any other complete context of information. These data points are all traffic lights based on the thresholds defined.

The components

Center

Top Half

Bottom Half

The finished product

As you can see, each Hivecell can convey 15 data points, and when you combine them in rows and columns you can convey a great deal of information without consuming a great deal of real estate, all in CONTEXT.

So below the consumer is processing 90 data points is less than a minute.

 

if the user looks at the above graphic you will notice that Labour hours is all green yet Labour dollar has three data elements that are warning.   They are beginning of last year along with the next quarter and the end of this year.   This quickly tells the story that although the hours are in budget the cost per hour is going up.  No graphs, no confusion, no tribal knowledge.   That is the power of the data visualization object, I have named Hivecell.

It truly is as simple as 15 traffic lights in a structured, easy to understand format that is respectful to the human reading the context before delving into the content.   A true executive dashboard that enables decision making.