Modernizing Data Dashboards.

Good thoughts, somewhat obvious, but still useful tips about the ideas involved. 

Modernizing Data Dashboards. Posted by Technovert Solutions on February 21, 2021  in DSC. 

Modernizing is critical to apply the latest technologies and practices to address areas where users are less than satisfied and data trust needs to be higher. In this article, learn about modernizing data visualization with dashboards and reports.... '

Dashboards and Analytics

Brought to my attention LogiAnalytics

Creating Genius Apps

Logi helps you seamlessly embed custom analytics in your apps—empowering your customers and employees with smarter insights.

In 2000, Arman Eshraghi founded Logi Analytics, formerly LogiXML, to help web developers easily embed compelling data visualizations inside websites. This core technology evolved into the Logi Info platform, providing an extraordinarily fast and easy way to embed operational analytics into any application.

Today, Logi Info supports over 1,700 companies creating genius analytic applications that are purpose-built to users’ unique roles and skills, and delivered in the apps they already rely on. ....  " 

Dashboards that Persuade

Whitepaper by Tableau Software.  Well done.  Registration information required.   " .... Do your dashboards tell the story you want to get across or does your data get lost in a sea of pixels? Tableau strives to keep our users in the flow with software centered on principles of design, cognition, and perception. The same principles apply to great dashboards. .... " 

SAP Previews new Analytics Tools

Appears also be trying to deliver more automated data science tools for specific usage templates:

SAP previews new analytics tools for IT, business users

SAP has made no secret of its desire to be front and center in the trend toward easy-to-use analytics tools, and on Tuesday the company offered a glimpse at several upcoming capabilities for different types of enterprise users. ... 

For example, for IT departments, SAP unveiled an IT Operations Analytics tool that's designed to help manage modern data centers. Announced on a conference call about analytics for the SAP community, the new offering aims to show what's happening all across a data center, including real-time streaming of log data and the ability to combine diverse data sources into a single view for easier root-cause analysis.... " 

Microsoft Power BI Demo

Yesterday attended the Microsoft Power BI introductory demo.  The presentation given was a bit shaky, but I did like what I saw in the simplicity of the approach for setting up data visualizations on easy to use dashboards.  This is NOT an advanced data viz tool, but looks to be an easy way to create basic dashboards.  Sign up here.    This is still an alpha version that may be changing.  

Several examples are shown of how to create dashboards.  Easy to do.  Most intriguing was the ability to use a natural language search or query about the data you are connected to,  then you can pin the query results to a dashboard.  Might be a good way to have a non-analyst iteratively create a dashboard.

Easy to connect to Excel and many other database forms.  Easy to selectively share resulting dashboards. They have also connected to a number of outside data resources.   A separate package called Power BI Designer lets you create more advanced visuals.  A Mobile App for the iPad has been created to display mobile dashboards.  (other mobile devices to come)  That App has alerting capabilities to update your data and alert you to specified data changes via notifications.  An advanced API exists as well.  Currently PowerBI is entirely free for use.  They say there will always be a free tier for experimentation, it appears a 1 GB restriction will be used.

Once this is complete it appears it will be competitive for basic visualization.

Pointer to the presentation.  Don't know how long this will be available.

Warning:  you need now to create an access ID based on an email address that is corporate or .edu, not  Gmail or other 'non business' email addresses.   I note here that other entry points to MS services do not have this restriction.  Poor, inconsistent restriction.

Microsoft PowerBI Preview

Walter Riker points me to the Microsoft PowerBI site.   Preview free trial.  Which adds data visualization and dash boards to many MS and other data sources.    "Power BI works for your role ... Reduce risk and increase rewards - unlock insights to drive more informed and confident decisions. ... ".  Also now has an IOS App:  Microsoft Power BI   Which I have installed.  Will be looking more closely.

More on Power BI from article in the MSDN blog announcement:

" ... This morning at Microsoft’s Convergence Conference, we announced new products and services that will enable organizations to create a data culture in all parts of their organizations. Adopting a data culture starts with making information easily accessible to all - our Power BI offering is helping to accelerate that adoption by changing the way people access, use, manage and share data.

First unveiled in January, the new and improved Power BI is a cloud-based (software-as-a-service) business analytics service for non-technical business users. With just a browser or a Power BI mobile app, customers can visualize and analyze their data with easy-to-use, accessible tools and innovative technology  ...... 

With Power BI our customers can keep a pulse on their business by bringing all their data together and monitor it through a single pane of glass. Live Power BI dashboards and reports show visualizations and KPIs from data that reside both on-premises and in the cloud, providing a consolidated view across the business regardless of where the data lives."  ... '

Power BI Blog.

Virtual Reality Big Data Analytics

Have mentioned experiments we did in this space,   Which were not successful.   Primarily because you already needed to be in this reality to make it work.   Once people are there, there will be opportunities,   Infoworld:

" ... Many analytical dashboards are graphical clickfests -- it's great that you see the high level, but when you want to get to the next level, guess what? You have several layers of abstraction to click through. They are as byzantine as they are informative. This is particularly true where real-world assets are involved.

Take the power industry, for instance. Having worked on a few smart-grid analytics projects, this is near and dear to my heart. Great, you have an outage. You see there is a faulty asset. How do you inspect what is wrong? Obviously you can go there, but if you have most of the data in electronic form, what is the next best thing to being there? Virtual reality offers a solution. ... " 

Taking a Deeper Dive in Splunk

Mentioned to me some time ago, as an interesting solution, now taking a deeper dive. See Splunk.com  ... Will follow with some impressions.  See the elevator control analytics example previously mentioned.

" .... Splunk is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California, which produces software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface.  Splunk  captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations. ... " 

Update:
http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAG2R    Using Splunk
http://www.splunk.com/view/SP-CAAAG2Q    Why Splunk?
http://www.splunk.com/get          Get Splunk
http://www.splunk.com/videos      Splunk Videos

Cojoin Analytics Startup

New colleague Thomas Ciszek points me to Cojoin.com:  In Beta, you can request access.

 " ... We are a team of agency, web and science data veterans who grew frustrated with enterprise sales and wanted to simplify data warehousing and data analytics. Cojoin is the result of that effort. Through Cojoin’s highly-visual, customizable dashboards, sharing data with colleagues has never been easier, making data-driven decision-making more meaningful and efficient.

Even with the power of “big data,” an incomplete analysis often leads to incorrect assumptions about what to do. By automatically joining and synthesizing data from multiple sources, and providing master data sets, Cojoin helps marketers gain the ultimate perspective on their campaigns.

Founded in 2012, Cojoin is a privately-held company based in Santa Monica, California.  ... " 

The Visual Organization

Forthcoming ( March 31) book brought to my attention, an idea we have frequently supported here.   For example, see the previous post.  Look forward to a deeper examination:

The Visual Organization: Data Visualization, Big Data, and the Quest for Better Decisions (Wiley and SAS Business Series)  by Phil Simon.

They describe it:   " ... The era of Big Data as arrived but, on many levels, most organizations are woefully unprepared. Far too many enterprises erroneously believe and act like nothing has really changed. As such, they continue to depend exclusively on reporting stalwarts like Microsoft Excel, static dashboards, basic query applications, and even traditional business intelligence tools. And they are missing out on tremendous opportunities. 

Amidst all of the hype and confusion surrounding Big Data, though, a new type of enterprise is emerging: The Visual Organization. A relative handful of organizations has realized that today's ever-increasing data streams, volumes, and velocity require new applications. In turn, these new tools promote a different mind-set--one based upon data discovery and exploration, not conventional enterprise "reporting."  ... ' 

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New Tableau with Boxplots and R

Have used the Tableau Software  data visualization, we looked at it before it came out of Stanford University around 2002.   I continue to use it, among other visualization systems.  The latest version, 8.1, has some useful features, I note in particular, boxplots and links to R.  You can try it at the link above.  They write:
 
" ... Tableau 8.1 delivers many features you asked for, as well as breakthrough ideas that will help you see and understand data in new ways.

Dive deeper into your data with new analytics features like integration with R, box-and-whisker plots, and calculations like RANK and PERCENTILE. Integrate Tableau with your whole enterprise with SAML authentication, IPv6 support and 64-bit software.

You’ll also see a number of usability enhancements, like updates to freeform dashboards, quick filters, and support for changing the start of the week. All of it at unparalleled speed and ease. ... " 

Seeking Common Languages for Data Visualization

An item in Fierce CIO attracted my attention.  Which pointed to Tom Davenport's HBR blog article this past April.   About how P&G is creating and delivering standardized visualized data.  Using examples of dashboard style displays.  Which I also wrote about in this space earlier.  I provide some additional motivation there to address the origins of the idea.  And how the standards of this delivery mechanism are still evolving, especially the inclusion of integrated analytical and user interface improvements and dynamics.  Should each of the supposed 50K users have the same interface and data? Likely not. There is considerably more in the detail of this than Davenport suggests.  FierceCIO also writes:

"   .... The point of all this is to establish a common language across multiple business units and geographies. An interesting and valuable side effect is that it supports P&G's common practice of moving managers across these organizational boundaries to provide them with more varied experience.  ... " 

Tableau 8 Guide

Recently released:  Tableau 8: The Official Guide   by George Peck

 I am in the midst of a project that specifies Tableau, and searched for several obscure topics in this book, and found them in this book.   Good sign.   Have used Tableau since soon after its release.   Tableau has an increasingly complex User Interface, because it covers lots of ground.  Will follow with a review as I read further.  The book's site, with sample chapters.  I have now used the files in an accompanying  DVD as instruction support, and they work well with the right pace from introductory to advanced options.   Very good so far.

" ... Present a unified view of complex BI using the entire Tableau 8 toolkit

Create and distribute dynamic, feature-rich data visualizations and highly interactive BI dashboards—quickly and easily! Tableau 8: The Official Guide provides the hands-on instruction and best practices you need to meet your business intelligence objectives and drive better decision making. Discover how to work from the Tableau GUI, load BI from disparate sources, drag and drop to analyze data, set up custom visualizations, and build robust dashboards. This practical guide shows you, step by step, how to design and publish meaningful business communications to end users across your enterprise. ... ? 

Measurement as a Path to Success

A favorite topic of mine.  Improving measurement can lead to better results, even if you don't apply advanced analytics to the measurements.  Because measurement leads to control.

 " ... Measuring Your Way to Success in Procurement and Supply Management
“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement.” – H. James Harrington, CEO of the Harrington Institute.

Across the years, companies have traditionally and exclusively measured their success in terms of financial achievements. In the rapidly emerging business world it appeared the need for a much broader range of measures, in order to keep companies and organizations on track into achieving their goals. This is how the fulminating interest in dashboards, scorecards and KPIs can be explained, and Procurement and Supply Management is no different. .... "

Information Dashboard Design

Newly arrived to support a project:  Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring  by Stephen Few. I will review in the future.  Their description:

" ... Stephen Few exposes the common problems in dashboard design and describes its best practices in great detail and with a multitude of examples in this updated second edition. According to the author, dashboards have become a popular means to present critical information at a glance, yet few do so effectively. He purports that when designed well, dashboards engage the power of visual perception to communicate a dense collection of information efficiently and with exceptional clarity and that visual design skills that address the unique challenges of dashboards are not intuitive but rather learned. The book not only teaches how to design dashboards but also gives a deep understanding of the concepts—rooted in brain science—that explain the why behind the how. This revised edition offers six new chapters with sections that focus on fundamental considerations while assessing requirements, in-depth instruction in the design of bullet graphs and sparklines, and critical steps to follow during the design process. Examples of graphics and dashboards have been updated throughout, including additional samples of well-designed dashboards. ... "

Portfolio as Innovation Dashboard

In Innovation Excellence:  We used exactly this approach in the enterprise new product development world.  Its very useful if you have many competing efforts: " ...As I’ve written before, the portfolio is the pivotal tool for innovation. It provides the link to corporate strategy; ensures the desired balance across different innovation horizons; enables and communicates priorities; and with the appropriate communication it reports progress towards innovation goals. It is this final point that I would now like to explore. ... " 

Building Dashboards in R

Have not tried this in my recent R exploration, but looks to be very useful.  Be aware this is fairly technical. 

Active Intelligence

Brought to my attention: Active Intelligence by Teradata.  Might this be usable for applications like P&G's Business Sphere?  " .... Teradata's customers lead the way on innovative uses of active data to drive business value. These 3 overviews will not only educate you but provide ample evidence why going Active pays off. The most popular uses of Active Intelligence are to provide Active Dashboards, Active Customer Management/Sales/Service and Active Operations. The other tabs provide details. ... " 

Garmin Heads up Display

Garmin has introduced a Heads up display interface (HUD) , to be placed on a car windshield, to be made available later this year.  " ... The HUD is a small box that sits atop the dashboard. It offers two ways to view directions. It can project them onto a thin film that is applied to the inside of the windshield, or it can project them onto a reflector lens that attaches directly to the HUD. Either way, Garmin claims that the HUD provides "crisp and bright directions" that are in the driver's line of sight and viewable at a glance. ... " -  Note the heads up display on right is not Garmin's display.