We live in a world of clichés and sayings. I spend over 50% of my time travelling to customer engagements and I hear a lot of regional sayings while teaching people how to visualize their data with iDashboards. And, I recently realized that a saying that is so relevant in my Midwest home this time [...]

“Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.” – Clifford Stoll, famous author and astronomer So what’s the trick? How do we turn data into information and ultimately into wisdom? We could collect as much data as possible and load it into spreadsheets, but then what? It’s [...]

I’m about half way through a book right now called Black Swan, a book that explores the unknown, the uncertain, and the unexpected. I personally find myself fascinated by mankind’s inability to ever fully comprehend the complexity of a situation, not to mention the ramifications of the decisions we make. It’s an odd concept to [...]

If you are an executive in today’s ever-changing technology environment, it is likely that you are often faced with questions such as, “How will we stay on point with the strategic plans and keep customers happy? Of course businesses know about the social media buzz, but another popular tool that helps businesses achieve tremendous results [...]

It seems like wherever I go on my engagements, my clients are really excited about the fact that they are going to be able to use a “state of the art” dashboard development tool. Typically, an engagement starts out with what is called “knowledge transfer”, which basically means that I show the clients a number [...]

Embrace the performance reality; you have seven minutes to leave a lasting impression. I think all HR professionals would agree that in today’s business environment, there is an ongoing challenge to transform the perception of the human resources department from a cost center to a strategic partner within their organization’s leadership team. HR is consistently [...]

Whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, I begin my response with “I work at a company called iDashboards”. Like clockwork, the canned response is always, “oh like dashboards for a car.” Of course this is not the case. But then again, what the IT world refers to as dashboards and what [...]

Did you know that charts and dashboards can be exported from one installation of iDashboards (called the source installation) and imported into another installation of iDashboards (called the target installation)? Charts and dashboards are exported to an iDashboards archive file (named with the .idbar extension). This file is then used to import the charts and [...]

Hello, loyal readers. If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you know that successful dashboard projects must be planned carefully. If you need a refresher, our dashboard storyboarding article explains how to define the What, Who, and When for each metric or chart. There is another important question that I like to ask [...]

As we all know, today’s healthcare environment is changing and demands for accountability – from true outcomes to demonstrated, proven cost-effectiveness – are becoming more important each and every day. In the Mental-Behavioral Health field the focus has shifted away from mere processes and procedures towards actual outcomes and performance based measurements. In other words, there [...]