ITIL - The home of bad diagrams

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) codifies the management of IT infrastructure, development and operations. It is also a rich source of bad diagrams. I recently came across this ITIL diagram:

Too many boxes and lines that overwhelm the reader. It is a classic example of violating the conclusion of Miller's paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.

A better approach is to use multiple diagrams. Let's begin with a high level diagram:

This high level diagram gives us context from which we can then dive into more detail. We also now have a title and legend to help the reader understand the diagram. The legend reveals problems, for example the lines nearly always represent deliverables however 'Early life support' is an activity not a deliverable. The original diagram allowed the same notation to represent different concepts.

The clearer diagram also makes it easier to see some weird things in ITIL. For example you would expect the 'Service design package' to feed into Service Design, but no it feeds into Service Transition!

Now lets dive into more detail about Service Strategy:

The box for Service Strategy is repeated as the title to help the reader navigate. The sub-stages are a different colour to highlight they are different from stages. The original diagram used lines with arrows to represent both deliverables and activities. The redrawn diagram fixes this, for example 'Develop Offerings' was changed to 'Offerings'.

The original diagram had additional concepts such as 'Return on Investment' and 'Financial Management'. These could be described in the supporting text. Do not overload diagrams or your message will be lost.

Interesting visualisation

One of my favourite websites is TED. TED is a conference organisation that has outstanding speakers explaining a range of topics. I just came across an interesting presentaton on a technology to visualise scientific data - you can see it here.

It is a hierarchy - not a flowchart!

I have just started using StumbleUpon, and literally stumbled upon a web site called The Toilet Paper. Each day they produce an amusing blog on something topical. One of their blogs was composed entirely of the following diagrams to explain U.S.A Federal Government expenditure:

It is a fun, interesting representation but it is also frustrating. The information is a hierarchy but it is being displayed in the style of a flowchart. The reader gets lost as they keep scrolling and scrolling. It is also full of distracting chartjunk. This is O.K. in a satrical blog but the problem is these styles are being used in business settings.

A more informative, though less visually exciting representation is:

We can now see some inconsistencies. The F22 Raptors do not have a second level breakdown. Department of State has an extra level breakdown for Israel. The breakdown for NASA is more of a commentary than displaying extra spending details.

The point is about the target audience. What is suitable for the audience of a blog called The Toilet Paper is not necessarily suitable for people in the workplace who need to quickly make informed decisions.

Inconsistency is death

I went to Wikipedia to see what they had to say about diagrams. In the top right corner was this flowchart:

I could criticise it i.e. why is 'Search Wikipedia' green when other processes, such as 'Think of another term' are red? However it conveys the message and of itself is relatively harmless.

Then I scrolled down the article where there is an example of a flowchart:

Now this is annoying. The notation has completely changed, e.g. decision points have gone from blue boxes to yellow diamonds. My motto is that inconsistency is death and Wikipedia has two flowcharts on the same page that looked completely different.

I also believe that less is more and question the use of showing decision points at all. Also the pink rectangle 'Lamp doesn't work' is a state and is too similar to the green rectangles which are processes rather than states.

Let's try another version:

The lines represent states and the boxes represent processes. The meaning of the message is still conveyed but with less effort for the reader. However does this need to be a diagram at all? For example:

This is less ambiguous and gets the point across.

Sunspot statistics

According to NASA in 2008 the Sun was at its the lowest level of sunspot activity for almost a century.Read more here. Even more curious was the bar chart that they used:

The data shows the number of days there was no sunspot activity in a particular year. Normally it is good practise to sequence bar charts from highest to lowest to help the reader assimilate information. Unfortunately in this example it causes the years to be out of sequence. Time should be sequenced from left to right with the left being the oldest date and the right being the most recent. I suspect the reason for colouring 2008 in yellow is because the sequence is wrong and the reader has difficulty finding 2008.

It is also jarring that the year is labelled on both the x axis and on the bar itself. My initial reaction on seeing the labels on the bar was that this was the number of units (i.e. 1913 days without Sunspot activity) rather than the year it occurred.

I would also avoid the lines running across the bar chart because it creates boxes that can distract.

Let's redraw the bar chart (I had to approximate the number of spotless days from the original diagram):

O.K. now I can some interesting things. 1911-1913 was big for spotless days. Then a 10 year break until 1923. Then another 10 year break until 1933. Then an 11 year break until 1944. Then a 10 year break until 1954. Then a 12 year break until 1996. Then a 11 year break until 2007-2008. The cycle of 10-12 years between spotless years was hidden from me until I sequenced the bar chart to match the passage of time.

Fun Diagrams

Jessica Hagy has a delightful blog located here. It uses various diagrams to show quirky insights into life. Below is an example.

Meaningless diagrams

The diagram above was taken from the Internet by a manager in the workplace and placed on the company's training portal. The manager said it explained Change Management (ITIL). It actually explains nothing.

The intersection of the circles are unlabelled - we do not know what they mean. The lines for people, process and technology are silly. Are they really trying to say that people are only involved in applications? Surely infrastructure and data require the involvement of people - technology and a bit of process cannot by themselves support infrastructure and data. The icon used to represent process is baffling.

The challenge is what would be a better diagram. Unfortunately the diagram is so poor we don't know what it was trying to communicate so we can't fix it.

Too many slices

If you have to use a pie chart - really there are better charts to explain data - then limit the number of segments on the pie chart to give the reader a fighting chance of understanding it.

The pie chart below is from Rio Tinto's 2008 annual report (Rio Tinto is one of the world's largest mining companies). Apart from being a doughnut pie chart, which makes cognition even harder, Rio has 10 segments they are trying to compare. Nancy Duarte in slide:ology recommends a limit of 8 segments in a pie chart. I think even 8 segments is too many and would go for a maximum of six segments.