Most executives and managers digest multiple streams of information on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Tying this information together quickly and acting on it is challenging and the end result is usually an executive or manager that is reacting instead of being proactive.
One reason is that the majority of those executives do not have access to real time dashboards. They primarily rely on historical information embedded in excel spreadsheets. They rely on spreadsheets because aggregating and mashing up data across multiple systems was impossible or expensive.
Depending on the company, data resides in SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics or a legion of other CRM, accounts payable, human resources and proprietary systems. You can build dashboards in most of these systems but they are limited to the data in the system.
Since every company tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) differently, this makes custom dashboard building difficult. Enterprise department heads need customized dashboards that display performance metrics related his or her position and typically that data resides in multiple systems. This makes dashboard building a major undertaking and is very expensive.
There are emerging solutions that solve this issue and do so inexpensively. Below I feature a few fully interactive ad hoc reporting and analysis platforms and Business Intelligence solutions that allow multiple data system dashboard building: (disclosure: I work for one of them)
| Factors | SharePoint 2010 | MindTouch 2009 | ||
| Collaborative Dashboard Portal | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Dashboards in free edition | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Dashboard Designer | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Contextual Dashboards | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Interactive Dashboards | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
 |  |
| Pentaho | MindTouch 2009 |
 |  |
| SharePoint 2010 | Jaspersoft |
Each of these solutions offer unique value for the enterprise. There is a big push for enterprise dashboards currently but most are jumping in without understanding the consequences. Work backwards and start with the ideal dashboard you need to run your business or division.
From my perspective, the future involves personal dashboards for everyone in the company. They will be work dashboards that automatically capture work and project activities from email, Google Wave, project management systems, enterprise collaboration platforms, IP phones, social media systems, and any other digital information that can be captured by computers.
Then, the data will be fed into your personal dashboard and rolled up to enterprise dashboards so that executives can see the health of the organization and take corrective action if necessary. Everyone will know in real time how much they are contributing to the company and be given multiple grading scores related to their job function and responsibilities.
The future knowledge worker? We’ll see.
(Cross-posted @ Seek Omega)
Great post Mark. Dashboards are a great way to see tons of information at a glance. I do agree that the tools need to be customizable to each worker, as many times each person needs to see different information, and people learn things different ways. So for some a spreadsheet-like UI might work, and for those like me charts are best. Getting the right information to the right people to make the best decisions is always the goal.
Great post. Not sure any of the vendors you list actually offers the real-time view which I agree is important. Sharepoint and MindTouch by themselves are collaboration platforms and do not not provide analytics (to my knowledge) but you can obviously use them as a portals and embed analytics portlets inside a Sharepoint or MindTouch portal. But creating analytics portlets must be done with some other tool. Jasper and Pentaho are excellent BI tools but hardly real-time as they are both datawarehouse based tools. It means that you first need to upload your data from your existing data sources (e.g. salesforce.com) and then load them into these tools. Only then can you run the analysis. Uploading (and later syncronizing) data can take anything from hours to days. And if you want to analyze data across multiple data sources, you may have to wait for many days. youcalc (www.youcalc.com) offers true real-time analytics and lets you either create the real-time dashboards in youcalc or embed youcalc analytics apps inside dashboard frameworks like Sharepoint, iGoogle, Salesforce.com dashboards, etc. No data upload is required - when you run youcalc is connects real-time to your data sources (any and multiple data sources simultaneously if that is needed) queries the data sources and analyzes the data sets - all real-time.
Rasmus, I am not an expert on Pentaho or Jaspersoft, but I can confidently tell you that both MindTouch and SharePoint 2010 have real time analytics capability out of the box. Let me rephrase part of that :-) I basing the SharePoint 2010 assumption on what has been announced. I am really interested in youcalc, please send me a message @markfidelman
Marketmesa.com has a dashboard http://www.marketmesa.com that can chart and compare hundreds of business performances - on your dates - in one screen. Marketmesa consists of two modules: 1. Database - named Stocks, 2. Charts - named Charts. Since Marketmesa Stocks was originally designed for the Stock Market, native data is accepted from Worden's TC2000 Stock Market programs. Non-native format data can be converted to native format data using an ETL - Extract, Transform and Load module included in the /File/Get External Data function of Microsoft Access or through other 3rd party ETLs found with internet Search. Many of these data formatting programs can be automated for each data source. Whether it be stock market, business key performance indicators or other entities to be compared, Marketmesa merges data from multiple sources and can automate to import at pre-determined times. Once the data is imported, hundreds of entities can be compared at the same time in numeric reports and 2D and 3D charts. 3D charts are particularly good at comparing hundreds at the same time. Charles Rosendorf - Founder, Marketmesa.com *** Your World At A Glance ***
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