Create a Subject

Learn how to create and configure a subject.

Create a subject

Subjects are entities that change over time. Examples of subjects include employees, applicants, requisitions, learning items, and sales opportunities. For guidelines about whether a subject is the right object type to create, see Should I create a subject?

Note: For a tutorial that walks you through creating a subject, see Create a Subject to Analyze Expense Report Data.

  1. In a project, on the navigation bar, click Model > Analytic Objects.
  2. Click Create Analytic Object.
  3. In Analytic object type, select Subject.
  4. Type a display name and description.
  5. When finished, click Create.

Configure a subject

Configure a subject by creating properties, defining the list of properties displayed in the Detailed View visual, changing the subject's settings, and more.

  1. In a project, on the navigation bar, click Model > Analytic Objects.
  2. Select a subject.
  3. In Attributes, create attributes to hold specific data for the object. For more information, see Properties, Dimensions, and Concepts.
  4. In Settings, define the object's settings. For more information, see Subject settings below.
  5. Optional: Do any of the following configurations:

Example: Employee

Let's say you want to configure a new subject called Employee. This subject represents employees in your organization. To set up Employee, you would make the following configurations:

  • Attributes: Create attributes that are essential for analysis, such as Career Level, Critical Employee, Current Employee, Employment Type, First  Name, Full Name, Gender, High Performer, Job Name, Last Name, Location Hierarchy, Manager, Organization Hierarchy, Performance Rating, and Tenure.
  • Settings: Configure the following settings.
    • Tags: Organization. This identifies Employee as part of the Organization content category.
    • Events: Conception Event = Employment Start and Termination Event = Employee Exit. This indicates that Employment Start events indicate a new employee's start with the organization and Employee Exit events indicate an employee's exit from the organization.
    • Captions: Instance Captions = Full Name and Secondary Captions = Job Name. This allows you to see an employee's full name and job name in Detailed View and Compare.
    • Primary key dimension: Enabled. This allows you to group by Full Name.
    • Large dimension search: Disabled. This prevents you from searching by Full Name (the caption) if it has more than 300,000 members.
    • Data version settings: Disabled. This ensures that Employee uses the default settings defined in the data version settings.
    • Default metric: Headcount. This means that if a user tries to analyze Employee, the default metric displayed in a visualization is Headcount.
    • Data category: Tenant. This means that Employee data is loaded through the Tenant data category. For more information, see Data Categories.
  • References: Create a forward reference to Direct Manager. This allows you to connect employee data to direct managers.
  • Suggested Key Groups: Add key groups to suggest to users, such as High Performer, Manager, and Critical Employees. These key groups will be suggested as group bys when users interact with Employee data in visualizations.
  • View Details: Add properties that you want to appear in the Detailed View visual, such as Critical Employees, High Performer, and Manager. These properties will be visible to users in Detailed View.
  • AI Configuration: Configure the following settings.
    • Properties: Gender, Tenure, Manager Status, Job Name, and Performance Rating. These are the default properties to use in AI calculations.
    • Change Properties: Manager Status, Performance Rating, Job Name. These are the default properties related to change to use in AI calculations.
    • Grouping Dimensions: Gender, Manager Status, Job Name. These are the default dimensions to use in AI calculations.
  • Basic Information: If Description is blank, add "Current employees of the organization.".

Subject settings

The subject settings allow you to modify its default metric, the subject's conception and termination events, and more.

Tags

Tags are user-defined categories that group content in the solution. A tag can apply to multiple object types, including analytic objects, metrics, and guidebooks. A user may filter for objects with a particular tag throughout the solution. For this setting, add tags to identify the object as part of a specific content category. For more information about tags, see Create and Assign Tags to Content.

Example:  

The Compensation tag is used for the Pay Change Events metric, the Total Cost of Workforce concept, the Compensation Type dimension, and the Compensation Payout event. This tag therefore groups these objects together as relating to compensation. The Compensation tag itself is allocated to the Talent module, meaning it exists within that solution.

Events

Events represent an incident at a specific point in time that occurs to a subject. They have attributes, but an event does not change after it has occurred. For this setting, select the conception and termination events for the subject. These events define the validity interval for a subject. Some subjects do not require conception and termination events.

Example:  

The Employee subject has the conception event Employee Start and the termination event Employee Exit. The conception event indicates that the employee has started with the organization and is active, while the termination event indicates the employee is no longer with the organization and isn't active.

Captions

Captions help the user identify a subject member or event occurrence. Use an instance caption to label members or occurrences by their property values; use a secondary caption for additional identification.

If a caption is set, it:

  • Displays the property in the Detailed View visual. For example, if Employee's caption is Full Name and secondary caption is Job Name, Detailed View will display Jane Smith, HR Specialist.
  • Makes the subject available in the Compare room.

Example:  

The property Full Name identifies specific employees. However, this may be an insufficient caption as employees sometimes have the same name, like John Smith. A secondary caption, such as Role or Location, further identifies particular employees.

Primary key dimension

If a caption is not set, the primary key dimension toggle determines whether the subject's primary key can be used as a group by and filter. If a caption is set, the primary key dimension toggle determines whether the subject's caption can be used as a group by and filter. Enable this setting to allow the unique values for the subject to be grouped by and filtered in a visualization. This is used in conjunction with Captions to define a display name for the subject's primary key.

Example: Employee

Let's say that Employee doesn't have a caption defined, but the primary key dimension toggle is enabled. In this scenario, the toggle allows Employee ID (Employee's primary key) to be used as a group by and filter in visualizations.

Alternatively, let's say that Employee's caption is Full Name and the primary key dimension toggle is enabled. In this scenario, the toggle allows Full Name (Employee's caption) to be used as a group by and filter in visualizations.

Example: Succession Candidate

Understanding your organization's succession readiness can be vital to continued productivity when turnover occurs. To visualize succession candidates as a group by, enable the primary key dimension toggle for the Succession Candidate subject.

Large dimension search

Allows dimension searching across all member values of the primary key dimension or caption, bypassing the default 300,000 upper bound limit of members. Only applicable when primary key dimension is enabled and the hierarchy has less than 20 million members.

Data version settings

Visier allows each analytic object to override the globally-defined end date. The end date specifies the range of data that will be loaded into the analytic object.

If the default is used, the global settings specified in the data version are used. If the default toggle is disabled, ensure that overrides are enabled in the data version settings in Data > Data Version Management.

Default metric

The default metric associated with an analytic object is used to generate system alerts and prevent an empty state for charts when your users switch between dimensions that have no relationship to the metric.

If enabled on a subject, default metric allows you to view the subject's history in Detailed View.

After onboarding data, the default metric is an easy way to quickly verify that the data for an object was loaded as intended. For this setting, select a metric that will act as the default metric for the object in visualizations and will be available as a data overview in the studio experience dashboard.

Example:  

The Employee subject's default metric is Headcount. Because Headcount is a default metric for Employee, the system generates an alert for Headcount to ensure its values remain consistent and expected. When new employee data is loaded, the Headcount metric can be viewed in the dashboard as a quick way to discern if the data is accurate.

Data category

A data category represents a dataset loaded into Visier that runs on a unique data load frequency. For this setting, select the data category that you want to this analytic object and its data to be loaded in. In your tenant, you may see the following system-generated data categories:

  • Tenant: This data category is the default primary data category.
  • Usage: This data category processes Visier usage information.

Additionally, any data categories created by you or your Visier team are available to assign to the analytic object. For more information, see Data Categories.