In their work, managers display some typical characteristics that are significant and relevant in relation to the design of the business intelligence systems they use. Other people, situated in the lower regions of the organization require also business intelligence systems but such systems are different in several ways. The type, the structure and the nature of managerial tasks as well as the working environment can play a significant role in relation to the user interface design of business intelligence solutions.
They have a considerable workload
Managers have a very high workload and are working at an unrelenting pace. They do so because they are convinced that explaining to others what they know is very time consuming. “…the manager finds it easier to do the task himself” (Mintzberg, 1975). Also, the job of the senior manager is of an open-ended nature, they are held responsible for the success of the organization and they can never say that they have finished their job and have never the pleasure of knowing that there is nothing else that can be done. The tasks of the executive are unconditional and are never accomplished since there is no condition that will state that the task is complete.
Managers are energetic and busy
What we have found here is what many people already know: managers are (supposed to be) energetic and busy. Before we enlarge on this, the interesting characteristic here is that they commit to a high working load because they think that doing the work by themselves is quicker and can be better performed than by delegation. The solution for this high working load is to share knowledge with subordinates. Modern business intelligence tools do recognize this problem and they support communication facilities in order to enable knowledge sharing between the senior managers and their subordinates.
A user interface should facilitate this in a much-extended way. Business Intelligence is “the process of transforming data into information and through discovery, transforming that information into knowledge” (Gartner). The senior manager and their subordinates should, when such knowledge is discovered, immediately have the opportunity to store the knowledge in the system. Speech recognition is an appropriate way to ensure that the screen remains undisturbed and completely visible. Even though the user can, in the meantime, select those parts of the screen to which the comments relate with the keyboard or mouse. A drawing tool like a pencil can ease this selection process.
No time to follow a BI training
Important too is that they have little time to spend time behind a computer and there is no time to follow a business intelligence training (overview). The information system must therefore be as simple as it is effective. But those aspects are contradictory. The user interface design criteria ease-of-learning (simpleness) and ease-of-use (effectiveness) cannot both be satisfied at the same time. However, that is not necessary since once the user know how the system functions, the ease-of-learning criteria becomes less important and the most effective way to perform a task can be enabled.
First time use of a BI system
Simply stated, for the first time an business intelligence system is used, the criteria ease-of-learning should prevail over the ease-of-use criteria. The variable ‘first time’ can be measured by tracking the years of Windows experience, the total time spent using the system, the speed of use, the amount of actions undertaken, the number of unused operations divided by the number of used operations, the familiarity of the domain, and how regularly the system is consulted. Figure 5 shows a continuum with the ease-of-learning criteria on the far left and the ease-of-use criteria on the far right. The clue is to find out how the user of a system can travel as quickly and smoothly as possible from left to right.
BI systems should support the process of knowledge gaining
Today's computer systems should not only be user-friendly but moreover they should support the process of knowledge gaining in an operational as well as functional sense. Moreover, user goals are changing over time (Mandel, 1997). Although the criteria of ease-of-use and –learning is valid for all computer systems and all types of users, business intelligence solutions should be even easier to learn and use since managers rarely have time to study systems.
Managerial roles
Managers play a role in the organization (Mintzberg, 1973). Managerial roles like resource allocator, monitor, entrepreneur, figurehead and so on, are expectations of the activities that managers should perform in an organization. These roles appear to be important in relation to the design of the business intelligence solutions they use. However, the problem is that they cannot be associated at any particular moment with one person (the user) and a few roles (e.g. leader) cannot yet be supported by business intelligence systems (Laudon, 1996). Nevertheless, each role requires certain types of information (Leeuwen, 1996). The entrepreneur needs primarily market information and information about the future. The problem solver initially needs internal, control and operational information.
The role guides the type of information
Although the role of a manager guides the type of information he asks for, it is uncertain if the managerial role will guide the type of interface of a business intelligence system. However, similar to the conclusions drawn by the type of the organization, the role of the manager can direct the location of the information on the screen. Therefore, in order to realize a mapping between the role and the type of information, I believe it might be useful to classify information according to the following properties:
- internal/external information;
- market information;
- protocol/procedural information;
- tactical/operational information;
- personal and task related information.
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