Dashboards Articles - Enterprise Knowledge

Data Quality and Architecture Enrichment for Insights Visualization

EK Team — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 18:39:35 +0000

The Challenge

A radiopharmaceutical imaging company faced challenges in monitoring patient statistics and clinical trial logistics. A lack of visibility and awareness into this data hindered conversations with leadership regarding the status of active clinical trials, ultimately putting clinical trial results at risk. The company needed a trusted, single location to ask relevant business questions about their data and to see trends or anomalies across multiple clinical trials. They faced challenges, however, due to trial data being sent by various vendors in different formats (no standardized values across trials). To mitigate these issues, the company engaged Enterprise Knowledge (EK) to provide Semantic Data Management Advisory & Development as part of a data normalization and portfolio reporting program. The engagement’s goal was to develop data visualization dashboards to answer critical business questions with cleaned, normalized, and trustworthy patient data from four clinical trials, depicted in an easy-to-understand and actionable manner.

The Solution

To unlock data insights across trials in one accessible location, EK designed and developed a Power BI dashboard to visualize data from multiple trials in one centralized location. To begin developing dashboards, EK met with the client to confirm the business questions the dashboards would answer, ensuring the dashboards would visually display the patient and trial information needed to answer them. To remedy the varying data formats sent by vendors, EK mapped data values from trial reports to each other, normalizing and enriching the data with metadata and lineage. With structure and standardization added to the data, the dashboards could display robust data insights into patient status with filterable trial-specific information for the clinical imaging team.

EK also worked to transform the company’s data management environment—developing a medallion architecture structure to handle historical files and enforcing data cleaning and standardization on raw data inputs—to ensure dashboard insights were accurate and scalable to the inclusion of future trials. Implementing these data quality pre-processing steps and architecture considerations prepared the company for future applications and uses of reliable data, including the development of data products or the creation of a single view into the company-wide data landscape.

The EK Difference

To support the usage, maintenance, and future expansion of the data environment and data visualization tooling, EK developed knowledge transfer materials. These proprietary materials included setting up a semantic modeling foundation via a data dictionary to explain and define dashboard fields and features, a proposed future medallion architecture, and materials to socialize and expand the usage of visualization tools to additional sections of the company that could benefit from them.

Dashboard Knowledge Transfer Framework
To ensure the longevity of the dashboard, especially with the future inclusion of additional trial data, it was essential to develop materials for future dashboard users and developers. The knowledge transfer framework designed by EK outlined a repeatable process for dashboard development with enough detail and information that someone unfamiliar with the dashboards can understand the background, use cases, data inputs, visualization outputs, and the overall purpose of the dashboarding effort. Instructions for dashboard upkeep, including how to update and add data to the dashboard as business needs evolve, were also provided.

Semantic Model Foundations: Data Dictionary
To semantically enhance the dashboards, all dashboard fields and features were cataloged and defined by EK experts in semantics and data analysis. In addition to definitions, the dictionary included purpose statements and calculation rules for each dashboard concept (where applicable). This data dictionary was created to prepare the client to process all trial information moving forward and serve as a reference for the data transformation process.

Proposed Future Architecture
To optimize data storage in the future, EK proposed a medallion architecture strategy consisting of Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers to preserve historical data and pave the way for matured logging techniques. At the time EK engaged the client, there was no proper data storage. EK’s architecture strategy detailed storage preparation considerations for each layer, including workspace creation, file retention policies, and options for ingesting and storing data. EK leveraged technical expertise and a rich background in architecture strategies to provide expert advisory on the client’s future architecture.

Roadshow Materials
EK developed materials that summarized the mission and value of the clinical imaging dashboards. These materials included a high-level overview of the dashboard ecosystem so all audiences could comprehend the dashboard’s purpose and execution. With a KM-angled focus, the overall purpose of the materials was to gain organizational buy-in for the dashboard and build awareness of the clinical imaging team and the importance of the work they do. The roadshow materials also sought to promote dashboard adoption and future expansion of dashboarding into other areas of the company.

The Results

Before the dashboard, employees had to track down various spreadsheets for each trial sent from different sources and stored in at least four different locations. After the engagement, the company had a functional dashboard that displayed on-demand data visualizations across four clinical trials that pulled from a single data repository, creating a seamless way for the clinical imaging team to identify trial data and patient discrepancies early and often, preventing errors that could have resulted in unusable trial data. In all, having multiple trials’ information available in one streamlined view through the dashboard dramatically reduced the time and effort employees had previously spent tracking down and manually analyzing raw, disparate data for insights, from as high as 1–2 hours every week to as low as 15 minutes. Clinical imaging managers are now able to quickly determine and share trusted trial insights with their leadership confidently, enabling informed decision-making with the resources to explain where those insights were derived from.

In addition to the creation of the dashboard, EK helped develop a knowledge transfer framework and future architecture and data cleaning considerations, providing the company with a clear path to expand and scale usage to more clinical trials, other business units, and new business needs. In fact, the clinical imaging team identified at least four additional trials that, as a result of EK’s foundational work, can be immediately incorporated into the dashboard as the company sees fit.

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The post Data Quality and Architecture Enrichment for Insights Visualization appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Dashboards – The Changing Face of Search

Chris Marino — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 13:30:00 +0000

In my twenty-plus years of search consulting, I’ve seen the technology move from something that hopefully worked on a good day, to a generally acceptable experience that was common, but typical. For a long time, search was all about words; you’d enter keywords and get text links returned. Though serviceable, this experience is far from natural or intuitive to how we as humans think and want to interact with an enterprise search solution. We’re now in a period in which search is maturing from words to a more interactive experience – one in which the relevant information can be delivered without the searcher having to ask for it. Dashboards facilitate this transition from an experience that requires an initial action on behalf of the searcher to a more interactive one where more information can be gleaned directly from the search results screen, and more actions can be taken that will facilitate the user’s search goals.

For the longest time, Enterprise Search has looked and acted the same way. Most of us can relate to the experience:

Open a browser and navigate to your application.
Enter some keywords in a Search Box.
View a list of results rendered as blue links with perhaps a list of facets or filters running down the left-hand side of the results.
Move back and forth between the results page and the actual results by clicking on a possible result and skimming the content.

In this instance, the search results are simply a list of links. Serviceable, sure, but not very intuitive, as in most cases they provide only a sliver of a hint about what the searcher will find once they click, and they seldom provide any actionable information without forcing the user to click at all. Truthfully, that is still an effective means of finding content and shouldn’t be entirely disregarded. There are still many times when your searcher will want the comfort of this experience. But that doesn’t mean it should or can be the only way to find content.

Introducing dashboards to an application’s Search UI provides three main benefits:

Returning answers, not simply documents.
Pushing information to a searcher instead of requiring them to pull it.
Providing a more visually appealing experience that isn’t just easier to understand, but more pleasant as well.

Let’s take a look at each in more detail, looking at what it is and why it’s beneficial to an organization.

Returning Answers, Not Simply Documents

One thing that I have learned in my time advising clients in this area is that not every answer to a user’s search is a document. Effective search is about finding and returning answers in all their forms. We talk about this in terms of the complete spectrum of content, or the complete ecosystem of knowledge resources. Unlike traditional enterprise search, today’s searcher is not always looking for a document, she’s looking for information. Perhaps a document, but perhaps a mix of results that could include other media as well as experts from whom to connect, communities with which to interact, and learning resources to enhance one’s performance.

Dashboards allow the presentation of content in a variety of formats, not just textual. For example, if I’m a call center agent indexing all my customer inquiries, determining which of my stores received the most complaints is not contained in a single document. However, a chart showing all of my calls broken down by stores will provide that information immediately. Getting the right answers to my searchers at the right time makes them substantially more productive.

Pushing information

Incorporating dashboards provides relevant information to a searcher without them having to take any action. Gone are the days when a searcher has to spend time crafting the perfect query before seeing results on the page. Relevant content appears on the home page in the form of dashboard components as soon as a searcher visits the page. This provides value to an organization as an employee spends less time looking for information, and more time acting on the relevant content they have found.

Visually appealing

Instead of presenting a staid page of links, dashboards provide the ability to present an interactive, immersive experience to a searcher. Built on the structured data gleaned from your content, a searcher can click through geo-location-based maps, traverse in and out of charts and graphs, and explore hot topics via heat maps to surface the information that’s important to them. This benefits the organization by increasing adoption of the search platform. A more appealing experience naturally leads to greater use which produces informed, productive employees.

Now that we’ve seen the benefits of incorporating dashboards into your search UIs, look for an upcoming blog where I talk about how your organization can get there, and what the key pieces are that you need to have in place to leverage their capabilities.

In the meantime, contact us for any assistance with your search and content needs.

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