We’ve had several projects working on designs for Enterprise Situational Awareness decision support systems. Essentially, this is a different name for what the commercial and financial worlds call Executive Dashboards. By applying a relatively new representational design concept based on Emergent Pattern Based Displays, a different kind of ‘full breadth overview’ is possible. These displays allow the holistic meaning of the entire breadth of the data set to emerge visually, exploiting the natural pattern detection capabilities of the human visual system. The effect is in some ways similar to what occurs in a photomosaic, where the holistic image is composed of ‘pixels’ that are themselves completely disparate images.
The resultant displays are intuitive, and remarkably effective, with only one drawback: the displays are not part of the old school ‘visual lexicon’, meaning they are not the pie charts and histograms of traditional executive dashboards. This drawback is also its strength: senior level users, now disillusioned with traditional displays (including commerically available dashboards) step back, listen to the ‘training’ on the new visual form (typically lasting a minute or less) and almost uniformly “see the pattern”. Interestingly, most don’t realize they are correctly interpreting the pattern based display. Typically, they immediately launch into a sophisticated series of questions about the work domain that have revealed themselves intuitively through the display. The intuitive nature of the display often masks these new levels of decision support, and the corresponding new levels of executive decision making. At some point, the users are prompted with: “Could you have possibly asked that sophisticated a question from your current system?” The typical answer is “No, but I’ve often wanted to.”
Representational design techniques, employed in the correct role in a decision support system, using proven Patterns in Cognitive Systems Engineering, enable an entirely new level of support for the overview of a complex enterprise. This is one of the many skills required to do effective Cognitive Systems Engineering for real world systems — even a new, powerful generation of Executive Dashboard.
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