iDashboards helps companies leverage information assets through visually rich, real-time and personalized business intelligence dashboards to analyze, track, and drilldown through a wealth of information. iDashboards continues to provide leading business intelligence dashboard software, with the release of iDashboards X Platform.

iDashboards X Platform includes a host of new features designed to improve the user experience, including custom dashboard backgrounds, ability to control chart transparency, search capability across charts and dashboards, and an enhanced user interface. It extends iDashboards’ world class dashboard software into a comprehensive business intelligence platform which includes alerts, analytics and reports. It’s BI on a whole new level.

Using iDashboards, customers will be able to create alerts based on definable data thresholds, and set alert notifications via email to predefined user groups. The analytics feature allows users to perform what-if scenarios within the dashboard. With the reports feature, there is the ability to display dashboard data in PDF and HTML. It scales from ten to tens of thousands of users and draws data from databases, data warehouses, spreadsheets, XML and other data sources to display all KPIs and metrics in a single location. Its built-in security framework provides role-based user permissions and access control.

For more information on iDashboards X Platform, visit www.iDashboards.com/X.

Renee Cassata, iDashboards

In the aftermath of the economic turmoil, corporate management is busier than ever making sure their company stays afloat and is profitable. Management teams have been tasked to cut costs and boost profits. Drastic measures are being taken to address the viability and profitability of the business. Performance Management (which includes activities to ensure goals are consistently being met in an effective and efficient manner) is often used to track important indicators of the business in an effort to make such decisions. These decisions, given the market conditions, can make or break the businesses.

How are these crucial decisions being made? And how good/effective are these decisions?

To make good decisions one needs proper insight into corporate performance metrics. Business Intelligence (BI) technology tries to provide the insightful information that management is looking for, usually pulling from a vast array of corporate databases. Business Intelligence may provide data sets, reporting tools, ad-hoc query tools, analytical tools and so on. These technologies organize, transform and present these huge data sets to the proper audiences, allowing them to make better informed decisions. Dashboards, in turn, are a mechanism to provide a graphical representation of this critical information for a particular function. Traditionally, this information has been accessed via reports. Dashboards have proven to be a much quicker, more efficient mechanism for presenting high level information.

Consider, for example, a national sales manager reviewing a 10-page report every morning, flipping through page after page to see how all fifty states are doing. This can be a burdensome task. Now consider a dashboard with, say, five graphs on it. One of the graphs is a US map with states grouped according to three different colors based on their current sales performance. What the sales manager needs to do now is have a quick glance at the US map for states in red color. This alerts the manager to the states that need attention. He or she can address the sales teams in these states, ignoring the others because they are performing as expected. The effort to identify problem areas just dropped significantly over the efforts to page through a multi-page report.

Quick and easy visibility into performance data is but one advantage of using dashboards. Other advantages include multi-level drilldown, alerts when thresholds are met, highlighting of interrelated data throughout a dashboards, and more. However, these benefits are topics for future blogs!

Zahid Ansari, iDashboards

Server hardware and server administration is a complex industry. Maybe you have seen an old server sitting in the closet at your office. Or even worse, maybe you’re still using that obsolete server to host your applications. This situation is not uncommon because businesses are trying to utilize and extend the life of their hardware investments. Although server administration doesn’t depreciate like hardware, the efforts applied to maintain a sound environment can be cumbersome. For example, why are simple ideas of a backup or security still like redesigning the wheel…every year?

Cloud computing is an alternative to hosting your own server hardware and enterprise applications. It works by using several-centralized servers (which share resources like RAM, processor and disk space) to provide internet-based connection to many computers. This structure of cloud computing provides the option scale any of these resources on-demand vs. performing a physical upgrade to disk space or other hardware accessory. Other benefits to consider:

Lower Cost
   • Monthly subscription fees instead of costly upfront hardware acquisition
   • Software and installation is Cloud administered

Requirements = Broadband internet access

Device Independence
   • Accessible with all operating systems and often Smart phones and PDAs

Automatic Backups
   • Eliminate the need for desktop and network backups
   • Avoid issues with trying to maintain “off-site” secure backups

Instant Document Collaboration
   • All users within your business can access documents and collaborate online
   • Accessibility to files is simply based on having internet access

Simple Security
   • Significantly reduced threat of viruses and malware

Do not fear this new technology. Major technology companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com and Amazon, offer cloud services. Each of these providers has obtained SAS 70 Type II certification that proves their dedication to security and data control. Various offerings allow businesses to make the right decision for their requirements and budget.

Ken Rose, iDashboards

When I applied for my first mortgage in 1996, I qualified for almost five times what I needed. The issue was I only wanted the amount I was looking for and could afford. The broker tried to explain to me that I didn’t understand, I could get a lot bigger house. I explained I didn’t need a bigger house or mortgage, so I bought the house I could afford and I was glad I did. This may not be the best time for this analogy, sorry. How about this one? If I went to buy a car and someone tried to sell me a top fuel dragster, I would say it’s too much. The sales person may say, “I can give it to you for the same price as that Taurus.” The question would be how much would it cost me to get it running and pay a crew to maintain it.

It seems that this is generally what happens in the business intelligence software space. Sales people and consultants present their software to small businesses and say it is really “easy to use”. They like to throw in that the customer gets so much more for the money than standalone dashboard software. The problem is the word ’easy’. We had a consultant demonstrate one of the “all in one software for a cheap price” to our sales team recently. Of course, it is cheap until you start adding all the pieces together that you will need, simple things like security. Most of our sales team’s eyes glazed over as he demonstrated an extremely complex product and called it ’easy’. It was easy to him because he has 20 years of experience as an IT consultant with a master’s degree in computer science. How many small businesses have someone on staff like that or even have access to such people within their budget?

My point is that ’easy’ is in the eye of the beholder, it’s a very relative term. As a buyer of dashboard or business intelligence software, make sure to get your hands on the software or have someone in your organization evaluate the software to make sure it is something you can handle. If the company can’t provide that, run for the hills or drilldown on what it will take to install, configure, use and support the application.

Dave Ferguson, iDashboards

Credit unions are a unique type of financial institution.  They are non-profit and owned by their members.  Executives have the challenge of keeping their members and employees informed about how their organization is doing.   This type of open communication is critical to the success of credit unions.

Dashboards have been able to address the need for transparency through web-based license solutions.  This allows dashboards to be displayed on both an internal website for employees, and an external website for members.  As one CEO from a 1.2 billion dollar credit union states, “A big roadblock to our success is our employees’ tendency to get stuck in their comfort zone and their unwillingness to leave them.  Coaxing employees from the silos by creating dashboards that show the relationships between departments and reveal the impact employees have on each other.  This will help employees work toward common goals in the organization’s best interest.”  

Another type of usage for the web-based license is displaying dashboards to credit union members through a secure portal and website.  As members come into this website for online banking, they are given access to how the organization is doing against their organizational directives.  It can be used as an overview for quarterly and yearly annual report.   We have seen firsthand how dashboard solutions can have a powerful impact on both members and employees.   It’s all about summarizing information and making it easy to understand and access. 

Lynwood Taylor, iDashboards

One of the evolving frontiers within business intelligence is gathering insight from the world of unstructured data.  Particularly in the web 2.0 world, data volumes are not just growing but exploding.  Twitter is a great example.  For companies looking for business insight, there’s gold to be found in the world of unstructured data from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the list goes on.

Recently we participated in an interesting experiment to build a window of insight within live Twitter feeds.  Using an innovative data extraction technology from Kapow Technologies (www.kapowtech.com), one is able to retrieve thousands of Twitter feeds on any particular word or term.  These feeds are then fed through a text analytics engine (in this case it was Clarabridge) that has the ability to give a quantitative score to each text string (in this case each tweet).  The score ranges between +4 to -4, reflecting whether it was a favorable or an unfavorable tweet.  Empowered with this information, we were able to create powerful visual insight into live streaming Tweets.

What made things even more interesting is that Kapow’s extraction engine could also capture the user location of each tweet, and therefore we could add a layer of mapping intelligence.  See the dashboard below – it shows the Tweet sentiments for Toy Story 3 and Karate Kid.  We used a scaling factor of 33 for sentiment scores to plot on a relative scale of -133 to +133.

(Note: Due to confidentiality of information, we have scrambled the data displayed in this dashboard).

It is a ‘wow’ moment to see how three innovative technologies (information robot, text analytics and data visualization) interfaced to easily create such a powerful solution within a few hours that provides an amazing insight into the world of unstructured data such as Twitter.

Shadan Malik
President & CEO, iDashboards

iDashboards recently attended the 2010 Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) Conference in Las Vegas.  The show is designed to bring industry leaders and vendors together to exchange ideas and promote products around financial management for healthcare organizations.  iDashboards’ main focus was to better understand business intelligence (BI) trends in healthcare and to meet with software exhibitors who are looking for dashboards to round out their BI offerings.

Some of the key themes from the show included Medicare payment reform, quality, physician integration and revenue cycle management.  It was clear in my conversations that healthcare organizations and software vendors view dashboards as an important tool to drive improvements in these areas.  For example, physicians who participate in the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) may earn bonus Medicare reimbursements for meeting or exceeding certain quality targets.  Dashboards are an ideal way to actively monitor and manage these key quality measures.  Healthcare organizations and software vendors are now viewing dashboards as a great way to integrate physicians into this process because they are so intuitive and easy to understand at-a-glance.

Software vendors exhibiting at the show included companies focusing on revenue cycle management, financial management, electronic medical records, practice management, staff scheduling and time and attendance.  While some software companies have some BI capability, many have yet to incorporate dashboards into their solutions.  Many of the software vendors we spoke to are looking to add dashboards or complement their existing BI offerings with something that is easy for the average user to work with.

Tim Sullivan, iDashboards

iDashboards is continuing their tradition of creating dashboards for major sporting events such as the Olympics and NCAA basketball tournament with the debut of their World Cup dashboards. We have developed a tool to track the results of this exciting tournament. This offers soccer enthusiasts a visually rich dashboard to access the latest information on match schedules, scores and overall team records. The tournament is taking place in South Africa from June 11 to July 11, 2010.

The tournament dashboards can be found at the following URL:
http://live.idashboards.com/worldfootball?guestuser=worldcup. Fans with websites or blogs are free to host a link to this dashboard for their audience.

These dashboards monitor the matches played by each team, match scores and points earned by each team in easy-to-view charts and graphs which are updated after each game. Teams compete to make it past the Group Stage and be among the top 16 teams. From the Round of 16, users can view at-a-glance information on team standings and follow who wins the title. There is also an interactive customized map of South Africa where users can roll-over a stadium to see the matches being played there.

So, get in the game with our interactive dashboards!

Amanda Fry, iDashboards

Some of iDashboards Higher Education customers have taken advantage of their web-based platform to keep employees informed across various campuses. One customer is using iDashboards to communicate with all of their campuses (nearly 100). The old way of having IT develop reports in Excel was proving to be a waste of time every week. The man hours lost building these charts every week and then sending out static data was becoming more and more archaic, especially since the school had prided itself on the fact they were on the cutting edge of technology. iDashboards connected directly to their database and used their right-click technology to make it easy for the users to create dashboards. Once the school had built the dashboards, they put it on their intranet for all campus employees to access.

Another university is using iDashboards as a scorecard to track different metrics for an upcoming certification. In similar fashion to the last university, iDashboards provided the real-time tool to keep all of the administrators across campus updated. The tool they were previously using wasn’t Excel, but an add-on dashboard module from one of the big business intelligence (BI) stacks. When speaking to the CIO about the module, he commented on how they originally felt very comfortable with the add-on because it was offered by the BI ERP company. Unfortunately, the problems started piling up when they wanted to get the dashboards implemented quickly and realized the amount of programming required just to see one chart in a dashboard. The IT team didn’t have resources available to put an employee on this module full time, so the end result was having somewhat, but barely functional static dashboards that were usually delivered late. Not only was it taxing on IT, but it also made them look bad in front of the VPs and Directors of the university. Why would anyone want to continue practicing this?

The more success iDashboards has in the Higher Education space, the more we see common heartburns for any university, small or big, relieved. It’s pretty simple – iDashboards gives institutions a solution to implement a best-of-breed dashboard that is dynamic and easy to use. No more paying for two months of services to see an inkling of a dashboard. No more waiting six months for programmers to be available to come onsite. No more ugly, static charts. The ease of use with iDashboards software continues to shock and impress every university we work with.

Jon Salmon, iDashboards

No matter the area of business you’re in these days, performance monitoring is quickly becoming a way of life for most organizations.  With the onslaught of a tumbling economy, government initiatives to further regulate industry, or a board of directors challenging the organization to optimize the way it does business, it’s no wonder so many companies are now looking to performance monitoring tools to unify the way they track their key performance indicators (KPIs).

Consider the vast array of tools that currently exist to assist an organization in tracking key metrics.  Now what is the value to the end user?  How are you getting your information and at what cost?  Certainly looking at thousands of rows of data may provide the answers you’re looking for, but the impending task can seem not only monotonous, extracting a reasonable conclusion can prove extraordinarily difficult as well.  Dashboards offer the end-user a unique way to view, filter, and drill into data, giving them the opportunity to quickly draw conclusions and correlate results from many different data sets.  In addition to all of this, many areas can be measured all from a single view.  While one chart from a dashboard can reference a performance indicator, another on the same dashboard could be presenting the risk factor directly associated with that KPI.  Perhaps, as a hospital system struggling to stay on top of HIPPA compliance, you’re looking for a solution to assist in monitoring that.  Instead of paging through documents and reports, imagine having them all compiled on one dashboard displaying your results in real-time.  Dashboard solutions are designed by nature to provide an at-a-glance view into the metrics you need to run your business. 

Let’s not stop there though.  Dashboards can be taken a step further offering you not only a unique view into your data; they can also provide unification.  Whether tying multiple departments together, or just several related metrics, a properly assembled dashboard can give you the at-a-glance view you need to evaluate performance.  Imagine on one dashboard viewing, not only your performance indicators, but the risk scores associated with that activity.  Now add a chart for compliance and you’ve given yourself not only a glance at how you’re performing, but a full risk analysis with a compliance report.  Imagine the agility that could be achieved by looking at a dashboard and being able to react and make decisions based on that real-time data versus thumbing through rows upon rows of data.  The ROI is right there, having not wasted hours performing the analysis yourself; you’ve made the decision in a fraction of the time and possibly caught potentially costly errors before they became such.  Or perhaps you hit all your targets, have nothing to worry about, and can now deliver a professional report to management.

The technology exists, in most cases the data is there, now it’s just a matter of finding the right solution. 

Jason Wolan, iDashboards