Department of Infrastructure, Regional Development, Communication and the Arts
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Within the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, Power BI is the standard tool for delivering interactive visualisations to enable wider public engagement with data delivered by the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics.
The problem, however, was that the tools themselves had no visual standard and were not user friendly. Support was required to create a visual standard and templates for Power BI, as well as to upgrade existing products and provide training for staff.
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Data Knowhow's Lisa Cornish was engaged to improve the visual style of Power BI visualisation, implement a standard, develop working templates and tools, and train staff.
It was first important to create a data visualisation guide that would bring in information on corporate standards – including colours, fonts, icons and more – and apply this to the creation of Power BI interactives. Accessibility was considered in the development, and templates and samples were developed to support use of these tools.
To show how these transition into action, existing Power BI products were converted to the new style and implemented as part of their existing dashboard publications.
Training was additionally provided to staff, as group sessions and one-on-one sessions to cater to the diverse needs within the organization.
The work was further expanded to transition PDF reports and release documents into this same style, using Power BI to produce the PDF outputs. Data Knowhow has been further engaged to support special projects that require data visualisation expertise.
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The data visualisation guide was approved for use within BITRE, and external publications have been updated with the new style. The approach has received positive feedback from stakeholders, and has led to further engagement of Data Knowhow to support upgrades of products – including the rail tonnage timeseries that combines Power BI with ESRI's Storymap.
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