Description

As the Instructors have had quite a few students ask about the possibility of using data beyond what is available on data.gov.sg (Links to an external site.) for the ECA, we would like to open up what is allowable.

In short, students will be allowed to use data outside of data.gov.sg under the following conditions: 

1.    The core of the report should be based on data drawn from data.gov.sg (Links to an external site.);

2.    Students are allowed to augment this Singapore centric perspective with international data (from sources such as https://www.gapminder.org/data/ (Links to an external site.) and https://data.oecd.org (Links to an external site.) or any other reputable repositories);

3.    Any comparisons made should be fair (i.e., students should convince themselves that they are doing an apples-to-apples comparison when they pit one country against another);

4.    Students are required to cite their sources appropriately.

Hi everyone,

Over the past week or so, I have fielded quite a few questions from students about the end-of-course assignment. I am concerned that the instructors may end up receiving wildly differing submissions with some being waaay off the mark. 

As such, in the absence of any alternative views from your instructors, I would like offer some guidance in how you should approach this assignment. 

1.    The overall intent of this assignment is to come up with data-rich visual evidence to help your target audience in their decision making process of whether they should show up in Singapore (either for work or to start a business presence here). So your mission should be something similar to this.

2.    Your four strategic objectives (one from each balanced scorecard perspective) are then designed to move you closer to achieving your mission. Note that you have to define four strategic objectives in total.

3.    Each of your strategic objectives should be positioned and phrased as something Singapore does well at, that is also relevant and an important consideration for your target audience in their decision making process.

4.    Your associated measures are then used as quantitative indicators to determine how well you are progressing on your strategic objectives.

5.    Your measures should be tightly coupled with your strategic objectives, i.e., if a measure shows improvement/decline it should automatically mean that you are doing better/poorer on the associated strategic objective. As an example, LTA has a strategic thrust of “An inclusive Land Transport System”. They have an indicator for the proportion of buses that are wheelchair/open-stroller friendly. If we see this proportion increase, it automatically means we are doing better on the strategic thrust of having an inclusive land transport system.

6.    There should be coherence amongst the objective, measure, and available data (i.e., they should all be closely linked to each other). If there is no data available for the measure for an objective, then you will have to consider modifying your objective or measure to something that you have data for. They are all interlinked. So you will have to be willing to change your objectives and measures given the data that is available to you.

7.    You can use data from other (reputable) sources. Just remember not to have these non-data.gov.sg based measures overwhelm your charts. (I believe the ECA designer has requested that the majority of the charts be based on data.gov.sg datasets).

8.    You can keep your target audience general (e.g., "foreign professionals considering moving to Singapore for work" or "foreign businesses considering starting a Singapore presence"), or you can zoom into a specific industry (e.g., "foreign data analysts/scientists considering moving to Singapore for work" or "foreign businesses considering starting a business within the tourism industry in Singapore"). 

9.     Assume you are doing up these visuals to be used to convince more than any one company, so please avoid zooming into any specific company.

10. A dashboard is analogous to an “elevator pitch”. Think about how you should design a one-page, stand-alone, self-explanatory, data-rich visual that conveys what decision makers should know about the current status (and future) of your project/organisation. As much as possible, design the dashboard to control the narrative to encourage the viewer to come to the conclusion you want.

11. In the question paper, Q1(e) asks for you to create a single dashboard using the charts created in Q1(d). However,  Q1(g) allows for the possibility of submitting multiple dashboards. So, if you have more than one dashboard in your submission, please identify which is for Q1(e).

12. The storyboard is your opportunity to lay out your visual evidence and explain (in a sequence of story points) to your target audience why they should consider Singapore.