Monday 6 April 2015

Dashboards and Data Sets

By: Andrew Leaper, Cory Dean, Demi-Jenna Aodan, and Lindsay Griffiths

A dashboard is a tool organizations use to graphically display important up-to-date information. The purpose of the interface is to allow people to see all relevant data for a business in a single glance, so it is therefore no larger than a single screen. Many companies incorporate business intelligence dashboards because they play an important role in planning, budgeting and forecasting and are used to monitor and analyze information.

Dashboards are used to display, compare and analyze historical figures with budgets, forecasts and sales targets. Metrics, such as revenues and EBITDA and key performance indicators used to measure how successfully a company is achieving its goals are displayed on a dashboard. Furthermore, a dashboard may be for a single department in a company and therefore other key data points relevant to a specific process or enterprise may be displayed.

Dashboards help with big data because they are able to transform complex datasets into simple and comprehensible visuals. They contain charts and graphs to quickly summarize important data and information. This visual representation of data helps people to recognize links, patterns, trends, and anomalies in order to help make informed decisions and understand the present performance of a company. They also allow you to identify and correct negative trends, improve efficiency, improve upon performed analysis and help businesses determine goals and strategies as a whole (Andersen, 2013). It also saves a lot of time, as real-time data is displayed without generating multiple reports. Overall, a dashboard is a snapshot of a company’s current performance.

Our dataset shows the carbon footprint of many different countries from seven regions around the world. The data shown is from the years 1990 to 2010. It divides their footprint into total amounts contributed by Natural Gas, Coal, and Petroleum then per capita amounts for each. An environmental nonprofit organization could be interested in transforming and synthesizing this dataset. Understanding this information would help a nonprofit organization know where to focus their work across the world and the reasons a region possibly has an increasing or decreasing carbon footprint. Our goal in analyzing this dataset is to determine whether or not there is a correlation between the size of a country’s carbon footprint and their population. To do this we will ask these 5 questions:

Questions
Metrics and Attributes
1.      Which region in 1990 began with the highest carbon footprint? Which region had the lowest carbon footprint in 1990?
Metrics: From Natural Gas, Petroleum, and Coal
Attributes: Region, Years
2.      Does the population growth rate of the regions above match the growth rate of their carbon footprints?
Metrics: From Natural Gas, Petroleum, and Coal
Attributes: Region, Years
3.      In 2010 which region contributed the most coal, natural gas, and petroleum?
Which region is the biggest overall contributor?
Metrics: Per Capita from Natural Gas, Petroleum and Coal
Attributes: Regions, Years
4.      Why is Eurasia the only region to have a decreasing carbon footprint?

Metrics: From Natural Gas, Petroleum, Coal and their Per Capita Totals
Attributes: Region, Years
5.      Why does Africa have a steep increasing carbon footprint?

Metrics: From Natural Gas, Petroleum, Coal and their Per Capita Totals
Attributes: Region, Years

Bibliography
Andersen, K. (2013, December 31). The Importance of the Business Intelligence Dashboard. Retrieved from mas software solutions: http://www.mas-ss.com/blog/bid/155733/The-Importance-of-the-Business-Intelligence-Dashboard

Chiang, A. (2011, November 28). What is a Dashboard? Retrieved from Dashboard Insight: http://www.dashboardinsight.com/articles/digital-dashboards/fundamentals/what-is-a-dashboard.aspx

Klipfolio. (2014). What Is A Business Dashboard? Retrieved from Klipfolio: http://www.klipfolio.com/guide-to-business-dashboards

Rouse, M. (2010, November). Business Intelligence Dashboard. Retrieved from Search Business Analytics: http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/business-intelligence-dashboard


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