Managers are often disturbed, have a preference for live action and deal with problems as a network of connected problems

Managers are very frequently interrupted by sub-ordinates and others (Mintzberg, 1973). Interruption causes the manager to focus his attention on another issue and therefore when the manager returns to the business intelligence system, whatever the time between, the business intelligence system should always remain in the state which it was in when the manager left it. If the manager was engaged in a planning task, the business intelligence system should refresh itself with the planning window. It should even give managers information about the completion of the sub tasks and provide them with the opportunity to proceed with the task. To decide to give an overview or not can be based on the time the manager was away. If the manager will complete with the task within a few hours, the system can present such an overview. If he succeeds within minutes, such an overview would not be convenient.

Explicit saving operations should be avoided

Additionally, explicit saving operations should be reduced or even avoided. This requires the business intelligence system to automatically store all planning figures and comments without any explicit action required from the user.

Furthermore, when the manager closes the application by choosing the windows cross in the upper, right corner of the window border this can be an indication of an interruption. If the manager closes the application in the normal way, for example by performing first a few roll-up operations and then choosing File, Exit, it might indicate that no interruption has occurred.

They have a preference for live action

Activities that are current, specific and well defined and those that are not repetitive are the preference of the manager. Mail processing is considered a burden, which is attributed to a number of factors:

a) the information is quite obsolete;
b) the dullness of the medium;
c) it lacks immediate feed back;
d) little information is of immediate use

To quote Mintzberg: “… there is evidence in this study that the manager demonstrated a strong thirst for current information and, conversely, that he tends to do little with the many routine business intelligence reports that his organization provides for him” (Mintzberg, 1973).

The diet of information the managers likes is not few made up of gossip, hearsay and speculation. He is willing to accept a considerable amount of uncertainty and “today’s gossip can be tomorrow’s truth”.

Visitor retention

To ensure visitor retention, it is common practice that web-sites are frequently refreshed. Web-sites are similar to business intelligence systems in the sense that they will provide the visitor with profitable information. To avoid dullness and hold the attention of the user, the interface of business intelligence & analytics platforms can also apply this principle. Each time the manager logs on to the business intelligence system, a (partly) new set of important facts can be presented to the manager, whether new data has arrived or not.

They like gossip and speculation

That managers like gossip and speculation calls for an user interface that tells the manager even slight divergences of organizational or personal goals. The most remarkable divergences can be highlighted. From there, they can for example drill-down to the appropriate view for further analyses. Managers do not like routine reports and combined with the drawbacks of mail processing, I conclude that the interface should be flexible, adaptive and dynamic. This confirms the expectation that the interface of a business intelligence system will depend largely on the state of the data. See also: business intelligence frameworks.

They don't like routine

Managers do not like repetitive tasks, which is of direct importance for the user interface. For example, a double mouse click is a repetitive operation and should be avoided whenever possible. At a higher level, the interface should also be able to avoid repetitive and dull actions such as inputting planning figures in a non-intelligent way. For now, this topic does not reveal any variation over time, among organizations or within the organization. The knowledge discovered here is of static, fixed nature but can truly enhance executive computing.

Managers deal with problems as a network of interrelated problems

Having an interrelated network of problems allows the manager to seize opportunities in a more flexible manner and to use progress made in one problem area to achieve progress in other related issues (Isenberg, 1984). Therefore, the manager should be able to combine views from various perspectives of the balanced scorecard or multi-dimensional model if they share a common dimension or aspect.

Managers can see relationships that have not yet been discovered

However, this sharing of dimensions is not a firm condition since managers can see relationships between facts that have not yet been discovered and modeled. The possibility of chunking information items (e.g. showing different attributes) on a single screen is an example of good user interface design for a business intelligence system and is one of the recommendations that emerged from a qualitative research study performed among managers (Borgman, 1994). Chunking information should be possible with tabular, graphical and other types of displays. Managers like to be able to display combinations of graphs and grids, representing different attributes, on a single screen.