With the recent launch of iDashboards v7.5 came a variety of new chart types; primarily Presentation Charts. For the first time in iDashboards history our charts can display more than text, dates or numbers. Presentation charts have the unique ability to dynamically display images and formatted text.

Our charts and graphs already have the ability to tell a story through the visual representation of data. In essence, the chart below should tell part of the story on how Plant ‘South’ has high costs and low productivity compared to Plant ‘North’.

So how do Presentation Charts relate to a BI dashboard? Here’s an example:
Manufacturing plants assign part numbers to different components. Business users often type part numbers into the engineering product drawing database to retrieve the image of the part. In the image below, the user found a chart where the product failures were high. By using interactive intelligence and a presentation chart, the image and details of the part are quickly displayed within the same dashboard. This would allow for faster retrieval of the image without using additional steps.

Presentation charts can save time and enhance the discovery of critical business data.

Ken Rose - Technical Consultant, iDashboards

I think it’s a safe assumption these days that most organizations have changed operational gears; looking to our past, let’s say the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was a lot easier to hit the auto-pilot button, sit back and relax while watching profit and revenue soar. Our global economy has evolved through the early 21st century though, most if not all organizations have clicked off the auto-pilot and business has truly become a cost-cutting struggle to extreme efficiency.

Lately, we’ve seen the effects of this economic downturn spread across every industry from the financial sector, to the housing industry, even bringing down the behemoths of the auto industry. To me this says one thing: it’s time for a game changer. It’s time to shift gears, and pass your competition. Perhaps you’ve been sitting right behind them, drafting, waiting for the perfect opportunity to down-shift and blow right past them. Well perhaps that opportunity has been there all along, you’ve always kept the data, you possibly even had to (thanks to regulation and compliance). So why not take all the time and money you’ve invested in, harvest that data and turn that into something. Turn it into insight. While you’re competition is still reacting, you can be evolving…to the next level of business intelligence. Deploying dashboards is an excellent way to monitor every aspect of business throughout your organization. While your VPs and directors are busy tracking performance, management can be busy measuring it. From there you begin coordinating those results to foster interoffice promotional campaigns and next thing you know, you’ve drastically improved your productivity and efficiency; if from nothing else due to the increased internal competition arising from the improved insight and transparency you’ve established. The paradigm then shifts and your organizational culture now moves to a mode of competitive excellence where nobody wants their numbers showing up as last month’s subpar performance.

Sure there’s an additional time and monetary investment involved to get there, but isn’t ignoring the problem part of what got us here in the first place? Micromanagement is overkill in many eyes, but no one said it needed to be that way. Oversight is plenty, and dashboards are the perfect solution to organizational oversight, all it takes is a commitment.

Jason Wolan- Technical Consultant, iDashboards

If you are planning to purchase a dashboarding tool, or have recently purchased one, chances are that it is for specific requirements and needs. Maybe the executive team needed a quick at-a-glance view of the entire company or a certain department wanted to monitor specific indicators. Or perhaps the need was to capture various indicators for several departments. A dashboarding tool thus should provide metric visualization from various applications and departments.

The purchase of the dashboarding tool could be for very specific purpose, however, often times that tool finds usage in unexpected ways. Let’s take an example of a company where the main purpose for the dashboarding tool was to monitor the sales & marketing projects, however, the technical support department could also use the application for their department management. Not only could they measure the KPIs for the management, but they started using the tool to monitor call activity and corresponding resource management by connecting to the telephone system. Another example is the IT department utilizing the dashboarding tool to monitor the status of various servers. A simple visualization of the servers’ status as stop lights provide easy monitoring.

Do you have a story of your own to share?

Zahid Ansari - Technical Consultant, iDashboards

One trend I’ve noticed while working with customers is a scenario we’ve named “scope creep”. This refers to the tendency of dashboarding projects to quickly get out of range with the target the developer is trying to hit. Something to keep in mind while constructing your dashboard is who will be the actual end-user of this dashboard. Doing this will greatly improve end-user adoption. For example, if I’m a C-level executive, I have a lot of big picture decisions to make. I need to worry about vision & direction. I shouldn’t be bogged down with everyday minutia like whether individual team members are meeting their KPIs or not; that’s for people managers to worry about. What I need to see is:
1) How the company is doing as a whole.
2) If the vision milestones I’ve created are being achieved or not.
3) Sticking points holding back the company’s progress towards my vision.

Creating dashboards that drilldown to individual transactions may be a great feature, but you should remember your audience & consider not burdening people with extra details they may not need. In the example cited above, drilling down to the individual level would detract the Executive from their focus of vision & direction.

Another example, going in the opposite direction, is providing individuals with info that is beyond their level of concern. For instance, if I’m a teller at a credit union, I shouldn’t be privy to the total number of deposits my branch has made that day. I shouldn’t know how much in cash reserves are on hand at any given time. I definitely shouldn’t have access to information about another branch. What I should be focused on is the customer I’m servicing. Should I try to up sell them into a line of credit? A home equity loan? A car loan? Take a moment to step back and consider the KPIs with which the person would like to interact. It might be more of a hassle for someone to comb through a bunch of metrics that doesn’t impact their working life.

Just taking the time and care to remember your core audience members, when constructing dashboards, will definitely help user-adoption rates and make you look like a pro working with the iDashboards software. Not only does this show intelligence, it shows business intelligence.

Matt Crawford- Technical Consultant, iDashboards

Collaboration via document management has become a central focus for many organizations, raising the question, how can we expand the concept beyond simple document collaboration and begin to collaborate on the central mission – including the critical metrics and KPIs that should be a focus for a user, group, or department?

Dashboard collaboration is essentially the act of providing business users, analysts, and executives with real-time views of their data, and creating an environment in which they can have discussions remotely as the data is captured. The concept of collaboration includes users working in sync and communicating effectively in real-time. Typically, businesses decide to implement SharePoint for the document management functionality, which allows users to collaborate on team documents. With this in mind, we can take this functionality to the next step and enable users to collectively work together by developing and viewing dashboards in an environment conducive to collaboration. Many organizations have static snapshots of their data in the form of reports, allowing discussions to only take place during predetermined intervals, such as weekly meetings, and not as the data is captured.

A reporting/dashboarding solution may enable features such as sharing developed content in real-time and commenting within the application. This will provide a platform for communication, enabling discussions regarding important metrics to take place, and fosters effective decision making. If these features are unavailable in your solution perhaps there are some workarounds for creating the dashboard collaboration effect. If your organization uses SharePoint it may be possible to embed the metrics within a site and configure the page to allow user comments or discussions within an existing collaborative environment.

Zach Breimayer- Technical Consultant, iDashboards

On November 9th, Adobe’s decision to discontinue active development of Flash for mobile platforms spread like wildfire, and was heralded as the death of Flash. Tech journalists and analysts wrote on the obvious and the news further validated the notion that HTML5 can substitute what Flash could do. After all, Steve Jobs was redeemed.

The reality is, that in its current state, HTML5 simply does NOT have the ability to replicate the rich animation, and slick user-experience, that Flash is capable of through Action Script and Flex. The key contribution HTML5 made to replace Flash is its support for embedded video within web-content. However, Flash’s contribution goes way beyond the audio/video support in a web-page. HTML5′s animation through Canvas Java scripting is rudimentary compared to the power of Flash animation.

So why did Adobe choose to take this decisive step? My guess is they want to pass on this burden to the mobile OS developers, namely Android and Blackberry. Any loss in potential revenue from Flash authoring tools will be more than compensated by the huge demand for HTML5 authoring tools, as Adobe now becomes the lead flag bearer for the technology. My reasoning is driven by the following write-up from Danny Winokur, Adobe’s VP and GM of Interactive Development.

“We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementation.” -Danny Winokur, Vice President & General Manager, Interactive Development at Adobe

Read the full blog at: http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html

The last sentence in this write-up tells me that Android and Blackberry are probably the source code licensees who will pick-up the ongoing development to differentiate their devices from their main competitor, Apple, which has sworn to ban Flash on their mobile devices. The advantage for Google and Research In Motion (RIM) to support their Flash is that they only need to provide support for their own devices, and not every mobile OS, chipset or browser. The jury is out on Microsoft.

My assertion is driven by the fact that we are all used to the high standard of animation made possible by Flash. Will content developers, and their audience, settle for a web-experience that is a decade old? Perhaps not, but until we have an alternative technology able to create that slick user-experience, mobile Flash will survive, may be even thrive through support from Google and RIM. Time will tell.

Shadan Malik- President & CEO, iDashboards

As we all know, today’s travel in the airport environment has become more complex and stressful due in part to our new global security concerns and outdated technology.

I recently had the opportunity to travel to one of our global partners. We strategized on the deployment of a complete airport service delivery system using a presentation layer. This project was very interesting from the onset, as state of the art technology would be employed to the new airport environment including security, operations management and strategic delivery of services to streamline customers’ experience while ensuring a secure and efficient environment.

With all of the technological components going into this new airport environment, it became very apparent that our travel and transportation industry has changed dramatically from what it once was, but that is the nature of technology right? Certain global factors were the key drivers for the service delivery system in accordance with new security protocols, operations delivery systems, and ultimately adjusting to our global transportation needs as consumers.

The Service Delivery Measurement component called for a presentation layer, and therefore a state of the art BI Dashboarding tool was a logical choice to serve the needs of the operational management to keep a real time pulse on the functional areas of the airport. The challenges come into play when deciding the best way to represent this data and ultimately the Key Performance Indicators that the airport’s operational management needed to know in order to effectively run the operational environment. As things came together in the development process through storyboarding and drawing out the key metrics, we were able to design and deploy several critical dashboards in which could be drilled down into from a main navigation page showing the status of the various terminals, areas, and subareas.

Once the “birds’ eye” view of the functional areas was created, there was a need for alerting key personnel to the status of the various sensor technologies that are instrumental in airport operations. Drilling down from the overall status of the terminals current state was critical in determining what would be needed to respond to a given alert and make an informed decision in maintaining airport efficiency. It just goes to show how important BI and dashboarding have become in today’s technological world. From the airline to the pharmaceutical industries, there is a critical need to know key performance indicators in real time and be able to make actionable decisions.

Andy Jesudowich- Technical Consultant, iDashboards

It’s getting cold outside. Thanksgiving is just a few weeks way and I’m excited to see my family and enjoy an amazing feast.  While some others will be carelessly eating away at their pumpkin pie, I’ll be analyzing the size of each slice to determine the varying ratios.  Did I just get the smallest slice because of my age?  How did Grandpa get the largest slice?

If the internet is true, pie charts have been around for over 200 years.  Yet here we are, coming up on 2012 and there’s still controversy over the use of pie charts.  Ratio charts, like the pie chart, take all of the contributing measures and compares them as a proportion.  Summing each proportion will equal 100%. For example, if I eat the whole pie, I get the whole 100%.  If I equally share the pie with my wife, I get to have 50%.  In a few weeks I’m estimating a slice of pie that is 11% of the whole pie.  I don’t care if I get 20 ounces of pie but I definitely want a fair proportion. That’s where the controversy exists.

Some analysts want to eliminate pie charts in exchange for bar charts.  Bar/Column charts can show similar visual data, but will not contain proportions.  With a bar chart, I can still visualize my slice of pie as being the smallest, but I can’t tell if we finished the whole pie! Examine the images below and determine for yourself.  Skepticism will continue for another 200 years on if or when it’s okay to use a pie chart.

Ken Rose- Technical Consultant, iDashboards

For a long time now businesses have been grading themselves using KPIs and metrics. This is all fine and well, but what good is a grade if it’s not effecting change within the organization?

We spend countless hours and thousands of dollars identifying targets and goals for our organization as a means for targeting organizational performance, insisting that inevitably these will drive performance upward, contributing to a constant cycle of checks and balances to make sure we’re on track for this month’s goal, or our end of year quota. Dashboards, however, are such a small piece of the puzzle that is the business process responsible for you not only checking to see how you’re doing, but then establishing a means for correcting negative activity and reinforcing the positive. Putting in place a dashboard solution needs to be a well devised, thought out solution, that not only involves an intricate process of identifying what we’re going to monitor, but then what are we going to do based on what we’re monitoring. All too often I see solutions where resources have been improperly allocated, whether due to time or budget, inevitably falling far short of their intended goal of producing positive change and encourage growth within an organization. What good is a KPI when you’ve got no business plan establishing actions based on the results? Hoping that those who see them will engineer for themselves a solution to produce corrective measures is no longer enough.

In a world where business is continually becoming more competitive, and only those with the most efficient business model will survive, it’s up to the organization to adopt a culture of agility. Be competitive, be nimble, and most importantly be ahead of the curve with your competition. Establish a business process; devote the necessary time, energy, and resources not only to establishing your metrics, but to putting in place a means for managing the results. Knowing where your bottlenecks are is only half the battle. Now it’s time to correct them.

Jason Wolan- Technical Consultant, iDashboards

Dashboards are a great way to keep track of important metrics and are a useful tool to help executive teams see where the organization is heading. The executives can maneuver the plans based on the latest trends on the dashboards.

The key performance indicators (KPIs) tracked on the dashboards support decision-making and operations. However, it can be difficult to get a complete view of your project if you have to switch between various systems because not all of the KPIs are listed on the same dashboard.

Dashboards that are function focused are definitely valuable. However, in order to get a broader perspective, multiple dashboards should be used to track metrics from several departments such as sales, marketing, and IT simultaneously. This dashboard may also be referred to as a Scorecard. Once you have the ability to view all of your dashboards on one screen, it is just like arranging the puzzle pieces to your liking. This will enable you to see the interrelationship of the KPIs from various functions of the organization.

You may also view important alerts throughout the organization which affect the KPIs as part of your dashboard. Sometimes there may be no alerts and at other times you may find several alerts, if this is the case, the dashboard will help you see the correlation between the KPI alerts from one department to another.

Having a holistic view of an organization can help to locate hidden trends and provides users with a better understanding of the interdependence of various metrics.

Zahid Ansari- Technical Consultant, iDashboards