Increasingly I have been involved in work discussions about MVP – meaning either Minimal Viable Product or Minimum Viable Product, it doesn’t matter the product is the same thing and the words appear to be interchangeable. What this seems to represent is the answer to the question ‘What is the bare minimum amount of work that we can do in order to say that we have achieved our goals’.

An interesting topic passed my desk today - as the title of the post notes. A dashboard is a visual representation of a report. Why this is an interesting concept is because in Business Intelligence we have been caught up for a very long time in intercepting 'Operational Reports' that should have been built in the system, and trying to convert users into less time-sensitive reporting such as weekly or monthly updates - which is something that has strangled data warehouses for as long as I've been involved with them (and before I got there).

Firstly we need to make a distinction between what we are doing in data visualisation and then to digest how we approach this same objective using different toolsets. Data visualisation is the graphical representation of data with the objective of assisting or augmenting decision making processes, and this includes the ability to watch these decisions tracking over time to confirm if they have had an effect on the business.