I wrote about this site and others in a post in July, Great Examples of US Government BI Transparency. Unfortunately, it turns out that it’s not so great, in that some of the data shown was completely false… (this is generally considered a reasonable baseline of things to avoid).

Seth gave the example of the graphic on the left below: “The Green and Purple segments are approximately equally sized even though the green segment should be 25% larger than the purple segment”.  Thankfully the problem has now been corrected, and the site now shows what the chart should look like (with the data values now slightly updated) – see how much larger the “grants” area is now.

The problem turned out to be with the way the site calls the Google Chart API. The values passed to the engine for display were absolute values, not percentages, so they are being truncated. (I’m biased, of course, but to me, that sounds like a good reason to rely on a full BI solution, rather than the Google Chart API… )

The real big cause for concern is that it was apparently only when the webmasters read Seth’s blog posting that they realized they had a problem…

“We had just implemented a new dashboard system, using data from a corporate warehouse. One key performance indicator had been typically been shown on a standard chart with the y-axis varying between 0 and 100, and the typical score was 95. The new chart engine automatically zoomed in, based on the values, to show the y-axis starting at 90.

Soon after the new system was installed, the team that owned the KPI had a tough quarter, and it dropped to 90.5 for the month. Because of the new charting system, this looked at first glance like a massive drop, rather than a modest 5% setback, and the manager called the dashboard implementation team to complain.

The team refused to make changes, explaining that the system was working as specified, and that a zoomed-in view was more appropriate.

The next day, after a refresh of the underlying data warehouse, controlled by a different (and more malleable?) team, the KPI had mysteriously jumped back up to 95…”