Designing a Dashboard without BI Expertise

Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of New Features in Version 11 of InetSoft's Style Intelligence BI Software. The presenters are Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft, and Byron Igoe, Product Manager at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): And so if we move on to next slide, it gives you the idea of how we have looked at those traditional BI challenges and how we turn them around into product development of the features and the benefits that you can get from our BI software. We have aimed for our software to be as easy as possible to both deploy and install and get set up.

You can expect implementation times that are more measured in weeks, it can be as low as two weeks, if you are focused on getting the software up and running. You can have a very usable interactive dashboard built in that kind of timeframe as well.

Our software is easy for end-users, whether they be the analysts, who might be specialized in information access, but even typical business users find the software easy to use, especially if you give them a pre-built dashboard, they can then personalize and customize and explore the data a lot. Even those business users who have Excel level skills can build their own dashboard or report from scratch as you will see in a few minutes.

You don’t need to be a BI expert or even have SQL experience to be administering or deploying our software. It’s a Web based solution, so it’s just a server installation needing a browser on the client device. In this zero-client environment, you can easily have the BI software accessed by all kinds of users whether they be clients or employees.

In terms of agility, agile BI is something that you probably have heard talked about by analysts and media nowadays. This is something that we have been talking about for several years now. There’s a set of advantages that our software can provide in terms of agility, not just self-service, but being able to react to user needs. Users can actually do a lot of things on their own, and that's a major advantage.

A key feature of our software, and it’s key for the agile BI concept, is our data mashup capability. This means not only being able to access and mashup different data sources on the backend, but it even means that end-users can basically do data mashups, even if they do not realize it. They can bring together different fields from different data sources. They can even bring in a spreadsheet from an external vendor, so then they can mash it up with their official BI data, and then share whatever they built back in the organization via the InetSoft BI application.