A .pdf copy of the article which I wrote based on my presentation can be accessed from their website http://www.aluminiumtoday.com/features.

When I delivered a keynote session at an Aluminium Conference in Oman last November, I was addressing an audience of Aluminium experts and executives. In addition, most of the participants were from the Arabian Gulf or other countries around the world and English was not their first language. Even if it was, I quickly learned that only in the US it is pronounced “Aluminum” whereas the rest of the world says “Aluminium”! (turn up your speaker volume and listen here)

Every other presentation had been directly and specifically related to the Aluminium industry and mine was entitled “Inspired Business Intelligence”.

So what, may you ask, has Inspired Business Intelligence and the Aluminium industry got to do with each other?

The answer is absolutely everything as I clearly showed in my Blog last November – Dashboards Making Big Waves at Omani Aluminium Company

After explaining to the audience what business intelligence is through a series of examples and then what inspired business intelligence was all about, I showed how two very different Aluminium companies had used business intelligence dashboards to both improve their operation and help initiate a culture change within their organizations.

sample dashboard

InfoSol has been developing business intelligence solutions in the mining and metals industries for a number of years and we have built up a solid expertise around the unique reporting challenges and key metrics used to monitor performance for these companies. This includes initiatives around safety, environment and sustainability which have become very prominent in these industries in the last few years. Some of these solutions will be presented and demonstrated in the Inspired Business Intelligence Solutions 2.0 Case Study track at IBIS 2012 in June.

InfoSol will also be exhibiting at The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) annual conference held in Orlando, Florida from March 11-15. TMS 2012 is expected to attract over 4,000 industry leaders from over 70 countries and this year they will be treated to some Inspired Business Intelligence.

All-in-all, it looks like the Aluminium industry is getting pretty excited about inspired business intelligence and especially BI dashboards and we are getting equally excited with the future prospect of an inspired Aluminium industry.

I was floored by the incredible amount of detailed information available at the click of a button and had to ask the question as to how much data was actually available to the dashboard. The customer explained that they had reduced the amount of data from about 500,000 rows to about 300,000 rows by organizing it as a cube in their Teradata Data warehouse and were loading it daily into the XML Data Cache (XDC) and using their XDC connectors in the Xcelsius dashboard solution.

They then showed me phase 2 of the project where they had placed a series of bubble charts on top of a geographical map to show location and type of accidents. They had built in the ability to zoom in on different regions of the country which was really cool.

But what really blew my mind were their plans for phase 3 where they are looking to collect geographic location information from the vehicles which are all equipped with satellite navigation systems that would transmit the location of the accident. The Business Intelligence dashboard would then display where most accidents and accidents of the same type were happening down to the exact street location so they could look for patterns and trends.

This is a truly inspired business intelligence solution and one of many that I am seeing these days. It is for this reason that at this year’s IBIS 2012 event in Dana Point, CA in June, there will be a 3-day Executive Track dedicated to “Inspired Business Intelligence Solutions”.

The track will consist of 12 inspired BI solutions presented by the customers themselves that created them. We have already encouraged several customers to present their solutions but we are still looking for a few more.

Inspired people with inspired ideas create inspired BI solutions so if you would like to submit your solution for this year’s IBIS and receive a $500 discount if selected then Just email ibis@infosol.com  a description of your inspired solution focusing on the following points :

- Why did you create it?

- How did you create it?

- What were the benefits?

Please include any additional diagrams, screenshots, documents, quotes , photos or anything else that will help to further explain your inspired solution. Also provide your contact information and the best times to call you to discuss your entry.

Of course, if you would just like to come along and listen to 12 highly informative inspired business intelligence customer case studies and save $400 then be sure to Register by March 31 to take advantage of the early bird discount.

It is becoming more apparent than ever that the leading BI companies of four years ago (Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion) having been taken over by bigger software application companies (SAP, IBM and Oracle) are losing their leadership position in BI innovation as most of their BI product development effort is focused inwardly to better integrate with their respective owners applications to take advantage of easier sales within their own customer base. They have almost become “legacy BI” solutions along with Microsoft who is quickly falling into the same category. As many industry analysts predicted at the time of these acquisitions, this has made room for new startup companies to fill the void left behind. So during these past few years , we have seen the meteoric rise of Apple with its mobile solutions, Saleforce with its phenomenal cloud based CRM application and Qliktech with its high speed, fast deployment BI solutions.

The BI landscape continues to change at an ever-accelerating pace and I am sure we will be looking at many new names, unheard of today, in a year’s time. In the meantime, here are my top 5 BI predictions for 2012 :

Prediction 1:  Mobile Business Intelligence will start to dominate over conventional business intelligence as companies will demand mobility as a compulsory feature. Mobile workforces will start to replace laptops with iPads (which will be the tablet of choice for businesses in 2012) as more useful and compelling BI solutions are developed for mobile devices. Companies like Mellmo, with Roambi (www.roambi.com), are already well positioned to take advantage of this trend but other strong competitors will emerge in the coming year as more BI dashboard solutions go mobile.

Prediction 2: Cloud based BI applications will propagate like wildfire and the race is on as to who, if anyone, will dominate this space. The question is do any of the BI vendors have the execution capability and the vision to do what Microsoft did to dominate the PC software business or Amazon did to dominate the on-line retail space – namely drop the price so low (or even free) to gain market share at the cost of profit? If not, watch out for iCloud or Google making a play for this huge BI opportunity.

Prediction 3: BI dashboards will continue to thrive but there will be more trend towards Operational BI rather than Strategic BI in 2012. As the capabilities for alerting, write back, connectivity to all types of applications (cloud, internet, on premise, mobile and machine interface) continue to expand, the possibilities and demand for operational BI with dashboard interfaces will too.

Prediction 4: “Big Data” wars will drive more demand for BI. With IBM leading the pack and SAP and Oracle not far behind, I predict a battle on an Exabyte scale as they and others compete as to who can analyze the most data in the fastest time and push it into meaningful BI solutions. The good news for businesses is that this will drive the price of BI tools down (as will the competition from Cloud and Mobile BI solutions).

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be super-hot in 2012. The demand to perform BI against unstructured data sources from the web and use BI tools to analyze and visualize will go beyond conventional marketing applications and become an invaluable asset in all areas of business. (Of course, this was the prediction I did not score myself well on in 2011 so I want to go further out on the limb with it this year!).

So let’s see what happens. I am certainly pumped up and excited to see how BI will continue to evolve this year. It is a safe prediction to say that it will evolve for sure but it is usually the unpredictable direction that keeps us (especially me) on our toes. Enjoy the ride.

This year’s “Best Business Dashboard” award went to Rural Metro Corporation for their Daily Business Insight dashboard which was developed to show daily insight into operational, billing and financial data from different systems delivered in a simple and effective way. The interface was designed in a format that made sense to management and provided the ability to coordinate the distribution of matching Web Intelligence reports to their mobile devices. One of the key benefits of the dashboard was that it helped to create a consistent means of communication across the business.

The “Most Innovative Dashboard” award was won by McKesson Specialty Care Solutions for a dashboard they developed to provide a single view of all program enrollment and fill activity for a key client to quickly access the data they need in order to respond to internal data requests, in a timely, efficient and accurate manner. The dashboard made great use of different Xcelsius components including color coded maps, selection tables and a variety of different charts while using tabs and selection buttons to make the navigation both simple and powerful. The dashboard resulted in timely and accurate turnaround to requests that benefitted both McKesson and their client.

The “Most Valuable Dashboard” award was claimed by Banner Health for their automated dashboard used to analyze and monitor patient throughput within designated Emergency Departments within the Banner Health system. The dashboard is able to access a large number of key operational and clinical metrics providing standardization and trust in the data throughout the organization. One of the key benefits was an improvement in overall patient satisfaction by reducing the wait time between a patient’s initial arrival time and examination by a physician.

The fourth award this year was renamed the “Most Inspired Dashboard” award and was won by Sohar Aluminum from Oman for their dashboard to bring about accountability, transparency in daily work and ultimately consistent, accurate data. The dashboard was inspirational in both its design and functionality by making use of write back functionality enabling supervisors to enter their actual and target results through the dashboard itself. In addition, other alert dashboards were created that are automatically scheduled and emailed to supervisors who are late entering their data. The dashboard has been so successful that it has actually brought about a culture change in the way people look at data and processes at the company.

After the awards, many companies present vowed to enter even more amazing dashboards for the 2012 awards and I can’t wait to see them.

My most recent opportunity was spending a month in the exciting country of Oman, which, despite the recent unrest in the Middle East, proved to be a welcoming, progressive and abundantly interesting country.  Apart from the opportunity to explore this part of the world, it also proved to be an exciting work project, as the dashboards I developed for my customer there included several innovative solutions. 

Upon arrival, I found that the customer had 52 KPIs that were being tracked weekly & monthly in over 60 different Excel spreadsheets, maintained by dozens of people in various locations.  The solution we put together for the customer allowed them to begin maintaining all the KPIs in a database (as it should be), by using InfoBurst to write back values to a database table.  Using Xcelsius as a data entry tool, we created two different dashboards for entering metric values which, with the push of a button, ran update queries back to our database table, which immediately refreshed and presented the data in the main dashboard for the General Managers to view.  This solution provided a new precedence for accountability and consistency across the board.

 There were two additional innovations to this solution which I am excited about.  Both of these involved automatically emailing a mini dashboard as an Event based Alert.  The first mini dashboard was emailed to the project team if a user modified one of the KPI targets.  Key users were allowed to change a target, but the team wanted to be aware when this happened.  Using InfoBurst, we created a query based event that checked every 30 minutes for a condition to be true (a target change).  Whenever that condition is true, InfoBurst initiates a burst of a mini dashboard (.swf file) to the project team, with the following information:

·         Which KPI target was changed

·         What is the new KPI target value

·         Who changed the target

·         What time did this change occur

The second innovative Alert notification mini dashboard involved the time sensitive nature of getting all the KPIs entered by given dates.  Schedules were created in InfoBurst to query for any KPI’s that had not been entered by noon on the first day of the week.  This initiated an email Alert burst of a mini dashboard to the appropriate person responsible for updating the missing KPIs.  A second schedule ran 4 hrs later and emailed the Alert mini dashboard to BOTH the responsible party AND their manager!  This process ensured accountability for getting these Key Performance Indicators entered in a timely fashion for all the General Managers to be able to review in their meetings the following days.

I foresee exciting possibilities that this solution opens up for other customers as well.  Imagine being able to automatically email a dashboard to the VP of Finance when Sales Revenue  falls below a certain level, or ….  Think of the possibilities!

It’s not just that Xcelsius is going places globally but wherever it goes, it is creating new Business Intelligence applications that are slowly but surely changing the world.  

Exactly one week after being in a major snow storm in Philadelphia, I find myself boarding a ferry in Puntarenas, Costa Rica in 97 degree heat.  I am on my way to visit my brother who currently is in the middle of the jungle in the Nicoya Peninsula.

I see a man wearing over 20 hats on his head that he is trying to sell.  I think to myself that this is quite a good way to advertise yourself because he looks ridiculous and people cannot help but stop and look at him.  Of course, I did look and he immediately saw the moment of hesitation in my eyes and pounced.  I had to buy one, it was only $6 – what a bargain!

 It also made me think about the multiple hats that many of us have to wear working in the field of business intelligence which includes so many facets including data warehouse design and creation, ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load), data quality, universe views, reports and dashboards.  While larger corporations and entities may have different people assigned to the individual tasks, most organizations will expect business intelligence personnel to do many or sometimes all of these tasks.  Some actually have experience that allows them to take on all of the responsibilities but they often end up like the man in Costa Rica, wearing all those hats and looking somewhat strange as they try to do it all.

There are definitely advantages in specializing in the different disciplines, not least of which is that you will need dedicated expertise in them that covers both the business and the technical side of the area.  To be a truly effective business intelligence report designer and developer for the finance department, you need to understand finance processes for finance, the finance data and the business intelligence tools.

As business intelligence becomes more and more significant in every organization, it might be worth thinking about getting more people to wear those different BI hats.

So the other night, my son decided to chat with me about cars.  This was mainly due to the fact that a girl from his junior class parks in the spot next to him driving a huge black Hummer.  He always seems to arrive at the same time as she does and, as he put it, “It’s just not cool stepping out of a little orange car as she climbs down from her big black Hummer.”

I explained to him that you really should not compare a Hummer with a Fit. They are two very different vehicles with different capabilities. A Hummer would be an ideal vehicle if you were planning some “off-roading” in the desert but for driving to school it is expensive, bad for the environment and not very practical.

Although, in many ways we are conditioned to compare, we often end up comparing items using different criteria and coming to vastly different results.   Comparing the Honda Fit to the Hummer may put the Fit ahead in terms of fuel efficiency, maintenance cost, price and many other areas but many people would still pick a Hummer over a Fit to drive.

So when people come to me and ask me to compare Xcelsius to Qlikview, Dundas, Corda or other BI dashboard solutions, my first response is usually to first ask about the solution they are trying to implement and then ask about what will be their main criteria for selection.

Usually, the bigger issue is the data and metrics that they want to compare. These often do not exist in a form that can easily be used in a dashboard solution and a Data Mart may need to be created first to do any meaningful comparisons. The quantity, quality and frequency of change of the data are also all important factors to be considered.

The dashboard, like most user interface solutions, is usually the tip of the iceberg above the water and the larger and more important consideration is that mass of data under the water. We tend to get caught up in comparing features of dashboard tools and the tool vendors love to show their competitive analysis matrices and reports from “independent” analysts and organizations that they pay to create for them.

Yes, factors like ease of use, dynamic visibility, underlying technology and price are important too but if you focus on the solution itself then the weighting of these items will become more apparent and fall into their rightful place. If the solution is too difficult to use or too expensive, then you can eliminate it from consideration right away.

I have always been a great believer in “try before you buy” but more importantly in doing that “trying” in the context of the solution you want to create. So, in my opinion, the best way to compare dashboard solutions is to set up a meaningful pilot project and see which one truly meets your needs the best.

No, I am not going to encourage my son to test drive a Hummer to see if it is the best vehicle for him to drive to school because there is no way he could ever afford to own and run a vehicle like that so we can eliminate that one right away. Besides, there are better ways to impress the girls.

So what can we expect to see in 2011?

BI Vendors and Industry Analysts are predicting all sorts of things for 2011 but they tend to look at the world based on technology announcements along with CIO and CEO interviews and surveys. Not that there is anything wrong with this, but the battle plan of the generals often tends to “miss the mark” in terms of the reality in the trenches.

So I thought I would take a stab at making my own predictions for 2011 for the world of Business Intelligence based on my own experiences both on the front line and as an observer in the general’s war room.

Prediction 1:  Visual Dashboards will remain dominant as the BI User Interface of choice. They will expand beyond their traditional tactical and strategic usage and be seen more in operational BI applications as backend performance with in memory analytics and caching continues to improve. Tools like Xcelsius will increase their presence due to both their visual appeal and ease of use.

Prediction 2: Data Governance will be a priority as both large and mid-size companies are compelled to accurately consolidate and clean up their data for more relevant and precise business intelligence. Data quality, integration and master data management solutions will become mandatory in many organizations.

Prediction 3: The race for optimal mobile business intelligence solutions will get into full swing. With a plethora of new tablet devices and new BI mobile software products, I anticipate a year of experimentation and we will need to wait another year before the real market leaders are determined. Watch out for Roambi (http://www.roambi.com/)   because they are definitely heading in the right direction.

Prediction 4: Relational database Data Marts and Warehouses will continue to be the BI repository of choice in 2011. OLAP cubes will remain a niche market and the new in memory databases are just too immature and too expensive to have a serious impact this year. There will probably be lots of hype but until this new technology is affordable to the masses, it will have minimal effect. Data Mart projects will continue to thrive in the small to medium enterprise space.

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be hot and in demand. The need to perform BI against the predominantly unstructured data sources of the web has never been greater as more business and institutions both grow their web presence and web driven marketing. BI tools and solutions that can quickly analyze this data both quantitatively and qualitatively will see fast growth and adoption in 2011.

So there it is and now let’s see what happens.

Wishing you all a prosperous and healthy 2011 and may all your Business Intelligence dreams come true!

Dashboard Development Services

Dashboard Samples

We all have different likes and dislikes to visual images whether they are paintings, cars or even business intelligence dashboards. I can personally testify to the dashboards since our company has developed over 400 of them in the last four years and they come in all shapes, sizes and visual tastes. I remember one particular dashboard that we developed for a transportation company that I thought was very visually stunning and provided multiple levels of drill down and some very powerful “What if?” scenarios. While the manager at the company also liked it a lot, his director felt it was not stunning enough and wanted different colors and more 3-D components. They both felt the dashboard met their functional needs but for the look it really just boiled down to a matter of personal taste.

The beauty of a dashboard tool like Xcelsius is that it allows you to design and cater to all these different tastes. You have a wealth of components, colors, themes and templates available and, if this is still not enough, you can develop your own.

While some people prefer simple dashboards with clear sharp components, others may prefer a more complex and richer look. If you do not like pie charts and certain colors, you do not have to use them.

Dashboard design is an art but the key to designing an effective, as well as a visually pleasing, dashboard is not to read books about the subject and it is also not to hire a graphic artist. The key is to sit down with the people who are going to be using the dashboard and to understand what they want to see and how they want to view and interact with it. While this may sound too simplistic, it is not. Of course, there can be room for visual enhancement and “cool” features but only if they serve a purpose.

There are many dashboard products on the market today that provide limited views and components so that you often have to force fit your requirements into what is available within the product. Xcelsius, on the other hand, allows you to design and create dashboards in an almost infinite number of ways and you are only limited by your imagination (or your user’s requirements).  As to how they look, it is doubtful you will ever please everyone but remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

For a gallery of Xcelsius dashboards designed by INFOSOL and defined by customers, visit INFOSOL’s Dashboard Gallery

In this blog I will discuss 2 methods, both of which are valid and are useful ways to organize dashboard data.  Deciding as an organization which approach you adopt can help with the process of taking up someone else’s project. 

 Some Xcelsius developers like to use a method of having all the data that is being used in the dashboard on one (or more) tab/s of the Excel spreadsheet, and then as you need to use data for display, using a series of vlookups or match & index functions for displaying data on charts, which they layout on other tabs of the spreadsheet.

My preferred method is to spread the layout in such a way that the names of the Excel tabs generally correspond to the functional area on the Xcelsius dashboard, perhaps even the same name of the Xcelsius  tab (Either the Tab Set Container or the Label based menu, is what I’m thinking of), so that all the data being expressed on that “page” of the dashboard is on one tab in the Excel spreadsheet behind the scenes. 

I like to have the data insert & any manipulations I have to do for expressing that data nearby the loaded data, so that it is all in one place & I can find it easily.  The only difficulty with this is when you have many components on one “page” or you have to create several aggregate levels to display.  Spreading it out & spacing it can become an issue, and this is where again, labeling the spreadsheet is so important.  (But aren’t we glad that if we move data around on the spreadsheet that the links follow, for those of you who have been using Xcelsius since the 4.5 days!). 

This approach, of course, assumes you have the aggregated data to work with!  Which leads back to my previous blog regarding data connectivity options.   If I have to use QaaWS, I end up having to do a lot of manipulation in the universe to get the data to look or be ordered the way I want to use it in Xcelsius.  I usually have to end up making many of what I call, “dimensionalized measures” when I want to end up with a crosstab result.  So I have a measure for Jan Sales, Feb Sales, etc.  Very tedious.  Sorting is another  issue that is often easier addressed in the universe, but also can be labor intensive.  

Live Office gives me the option to create crosstabs and sort the data in any way I wish and I can also have multiple tabs to aggregate the data at different levels (YTD, MTD,  past 30 days, etc).  The problem that I so often bump into with this approach is the amount of data when we get down to the detail level.  We have all experienced poor performance any time we go over the 512 row default and horrible performance when we approach 1000 rows. 

All of these are reasons why I enjoy using the InfoBurst XDS or XDM option, as it addresses all these issues, plus gives me many more options.  The Intelligent Cache syntax of this tool is by far the most exciting feature, in my opinion.  Using their syntax, I can pass parameters to the XML url call and only return the rows of data I wish to display.  For example, within my xml url call, I can add syntax that returns …. YEAR=2009;DIVISION=HPD;DEPT=23.  This ability to extract just the rows of data I want to display helps keep my dashboards very responsive, since I am not loading it down with too much data.  It also gives me the ability to go to a much more detailed level than I would have been able to with QaaWS or LiveOffice.

XDS or XDM also has syntax to return unique values of a particular column from an xml data set which I can use for  my selector.  My selector will always have accurate values, as it is loaded from the current xml cache, rather than from a hard-coded list in my Excel spreadsheet which may not be up-to-date.

And, I have the flexibility to create these large XML data sets from a Web Intelligence document or by writing a query, directly to the database, or even from an Excel spreadsheet, and any combination of all three!