What is a hierarchy?
A hierarchy is how an organization breaks into nested sections. Each person (or location) sits on a path from the top level down to a leaf.
Org example:
Company (top)
Department (for example, product engineering)
Cost center (where time is billed; some companies budget strictly by cost center)
Someone can be in Engineering and still bill to cost center A while a teammate in the same department bills to cost center B.
Large organizations may have multiple companies or subsidiaries under one entity (for example, different business lines). The same department name can exist in more than one company, so hierarchy paths identify where a person sits (company → department → cost center).
Location example: Country → state/province → city (US states vs Canadian provinces, then cities).
Why create hierarchies?
Hierarchies make it easy to build stories that group by hierarchy and let executives drill:
See headcount by country (or by company).
Click into a country/company to split by state/department.
Click again to split by city/cost center.
Continue until you reach the people behind the number.
Example — location: USA 300, Canada 400, Mexico 500 → open USA → Texas 10, California 20, … → open Texas → Dallas 2, Houston 1, …
Example — org hierarchy: Company total → Engineering 8 / Sales 2 → Engineering cost center A (find a specific person) vs cost center B.
Create or configure a hierarchy
Open Analytics → Manage Analytics.
Open the Hierarchies area.
Create a hierarchy and define its levels in order (for example, Company → Department → Cost Center, or Country → State → City).
Map each level to the Ontology / data fields your organization uses for that slice.
Enter data for the required fields.
Save the hierarchy.
Use hierarchies in stories
Create or open a story.
Choose a calculation (measure or metric), such as headcount.
Group by the hierarchy (instead of—or in addition to—a flat dimension, depending on product options in your environment).
Viewers drill level by level from the visual.