Abstract—Excellent data visualization has become a major requirement in today’s decision support system especially in a very competitive business domain. Visualization becomes critical when data are huge, comprehensive, and originate from various sources and in a variety of formats. The criticality of data visualization increase even higher when a substantial investment is made to monitor and ensure the overall business operation and infrastructures is in good condition thus avoiding huge loss to any particular company. Yet, choosing an operations dashboard with outstanding data visualization has become a tricky proposition to operational and support personnel. With various technologies, comprehensiveness, visual embellishment, design and aesthetics, visual metaphor, and data memorability as fundamental in selecting superb data visualization, selecting a suitable dashboard is very tricky. Hence, this paper briefly studies data visualization and offer comparative detailed analysis on data visualization with regards to operations dashboard. The result of this comparative analysis is applicable to any business system and a novel contribution to the community. With this study and analysis, it is hoped that it can be applied to define, select, or develop a well-defined operations dashboard with excellent data visualization.
Index Terms—Visualization, visual embellishment, graphical user interface, data presentation, data representation, data analysis.
N. N. Ramly, F. M. Nor, and M. H. Aziz are with the Infostructure Lab, Software R&D and Infostructure Lab, MIMOS Berhad, TPM Bukit Jalil, 57000 K.L, Malaysia (fazli.mnor@mimos.my).
N. H. Ahmad is with the Universiti Teknologi MARA, 40450 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia.
Cite: Noor Nashriq Ramly, Fazli Mat Nor, Nurul Haszeli Ahmad, and Mohd Haris Aziz, "Comparative Analysis on Data Visualization for Operations Dashboard," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 287-290, 2012.