DEVELOPMENT OF A MODEL AND A SOFTWARE SOLUTION TO SUPPORT THE ANALYTICAL DASHBOARDS DESIGN PROBLEM

Abstract

This research paper considers the problem of dashboard design as part of the Business Process Management lifecycle, where it is become necessary to monitor and control the current state of the organizational business processes. Therefore, designed dashboards should fully correspond to the features of the considered business processes, such as Key Performance Indicators and possible stakeholders, which are considered here as users of the developed Business Intelligence dashboard application. At the same time, according to the state-of-the-art in the field of data visualization, it is required to choose data visualization techniques, which are clear, easy interpretable, space efficient, attractive, and legible. In general, the dashboard design problem requires placing various visualization tools in a relatively small place, such as a screen of a computer, a laptop, a tablet, or even a smart phone, while keeping them accessible and easy to understand. At first, as part of the related work review and analysis, we have considered the core architecture of the dashboards and reporting applications. It is outlined that modern dashboards might use various big data chunks, such as databases of enterprise information systems of different types, spreadsheets data, and even unstructured documents. In order to summarize all the raw data from these data sources, the Data Warehouse should be built and, moreover, it should correspond to the metrics and indicators of business processes that should be demonstrated on a dashboard. We have also considered main principles, common mistakes, and graphs and charts that might be used to design a dashboard for business analytics purposes. Using the existing research in this field, the levels of informativeness were defined for each visualization tool, as well as the best practices of mapping various data types to graphs and charts are outlined. Proposed model of the da shboard design is based on the mathematical optimization. It is used to provide recommendations on which visualization tool should be used to display a certain Key Performance Indicator on a dashboard that corresponds to a certain user role. Development and usage of the software solution that implements the proposed model is outlined, as well as the obtained results of validation of the proposed software solution are shown and discussed.