InetSoft Webinar: Is data mash up evolving as the preferred way to view enterprise data because of the agility and versatility that it enables?

This is a continuation of a transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft entitled "Designing a Good Dashboard." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): I absolutely believe that’s the trend. Business users don’t want to have to go back to IT every time they want a new piece of data or customize a dashboard. They want to see their dashboard in particular way. They want to be empowered so that they can personalize their dashboards to their particular needs. The benefit of data mashup is that shortens the time that it takes to get a dashboard that is useful for a business user. They can more easily build their own.

How do you actually enable or power a user to leverage data mashups?

It has to start with the business analyst. They have to build up all the KPIs that the organization has available. And use our software to see all the available KPIs. And then it’s a matter of dragging and dropping them onto their dashboard canvas, and that’s how they’re able to create their own dashboard. This is going to be a really powerful way to let people look at data, because you don’t want to go back to IT all the time.

Is transparency of decision making a critical component of dashboards?

It is. Because you can, as a senior manager, see by virtue of looking down a layer of dashboards, what people are doing, what decisions they have been making and when. That gives you a lot of ability to understand what is happening.

Indeed, a lot of things have changed in the past ten years in the whole BI and dashboard space. One of the biggest things we are seeing and are very excited about, because it aligns well with our strategy, is the idea is that the KPIs and business metrics can really escape the upper echelon of the organization and be applicable to the entire hierarchy of an organization. And that is where we do see a tremendous amount of benefit, because we have always found the information has been there, and definitely more so than in the past few years. The world is more instrumented. The modern enterprise is more instrumented. We are also seeing the trends such as SaaS and Web 2.0.

But while the information may be captured somewhere, the problem is that it’s not always visible to everybody. And a lot of time we’ve seen organizations where in the past they have had a BI analyst in Germany, a BI analyst in France, a BI analyst in the UK, all responsible for generating reports. That’s where we started. And I think today’s culture is much more one where the reliance on the BI analyst isn’t as great any more, because information can flow in a more near real time scenario.

Read why choosing InetSoft's cloud-flexible BI provides advantages over other BI options.

Especially if you keep information simple, contextualized, so you know what your goals are, what the benchmarks are. And then that information can get out to all the folks in the organization, relevant to what their job is. I think that is where there is a huge opportunity for performance gains.