Our IBI double list box control, unique to WebFOCUS, has a good user input experience. Most notably is how the control keeps track of the values selected in a visible manner on the right side. Here’s a screenshot of what I mean. ...

A common function of a WebFOCUS report is to drill down to another report or the same report with different parameters. Below is an example of a report that drills down to another report that takes the car brand as a parameter. Figure 1. This is the report that shows all the cars and their...

I found this interesting blog post that brought the following to my attention. Yahoo! Mail data is now readily available for people to see through their visualization site here. It's cool but I have a hard time understanding how to read the data. For example, it's not clear what the size of the bubbles means. I'm guessing it represents the number of emails being sent. When I click on the bubble, I actually have no idea what the animation represents. When I click on one of the email images, it gets even more confusing. Play around with it and you'll know...

A couple of weeks ago I declared war on poor dashboard designs. Now, I've officially shot the first volley. I have been planning a dashboard design contest on Dashboard Insight for the last few weeks and now it is live. If you want to join my fight, then sign up for the contest. The winner will be featured on Dashboard Insight's home page and they will receive an iPad 2 and a collection of must read BI books. Our sponsors include Dundas, Tableau, QlikView, InetSoft, and XLCubed. They believe in the importance of this contest and I hope you show...

ComputerWorld Canada recently did a survey on executives and their experiences with BI. I don't like being snarky but I thought the questions that were asked to the 70 Canadian IT execs were not the right questions to ask. Here they are: Do you have a standard BI platform across the organization? Is BI critical to your organization? Does IT spend a lot of time preparing BI data? I think the first question is irrelevant. Does it really matter if an organization uses several tools? My answer is no, as long as they...

On Thursday, I posted an Op Ed on Dashboard Insight declaring a war on poor dashboard designs. In the article, I gave suggestions on how to transition out requirements such as 3D charts and speedometers. This is just the first battle in this war. However, at the end of it, I believe we will win and bring a much needed new era in dashboards and business intelligence. How can you help? Stay tuned until next Friday...

There's a lot of interesting opinions that are circulating on the web about laptops and desktops being replaced by smart phones and tablets. With current mobile devices' small screen space and lack of a full keyboard, I doubt very much that's going to happen any time soon. Imagine creating a spreadsheet or writing a document on that type of interface. It would be painful and frustrating. Office productivity software leverages keyboard shortcuts and mouse interactions such as right click to give you quicker access to features. In addition, screen real estate is VERY important. I've used two monitors since 2000 with...

I recently posted an article on Dashboard Insight to answer the question: what is BI? In the article I didn't dive into the details of the processes, the data, the technology, and all the other intricacies of BI. I purposely did that because I felt all the other BI resources explained BI in the traditional sense very well. What I wanted to drive home with my article was the importance of aligning strategic goals with operational activities. It sounds obvious but from my experience I find BI initiatives do not take this into account. BI usually means streamlining the process...

My post last week on mobile BI centered around Microsoft's strategy. Interestingly enough, a recent survey on mobile BI mentioned on Dashboard Insight revealed that dashboards were not being adopted by business users for business intelligence purposes. In fact, the results were a staggering 3% using smart phones for business applications and 7% using tablets. I'm not really surprised. The survey was answered by managers. Mobile BI is more beneficial to those who are out in the field dealing directly with clients or on client sites. Managers who do not have these types of responsibilities can't take full advantage...

I found an interesting post online today that commented on Microsoft's mobile business intelligence strategy - or lack thereof.  Why doesn't MS have a mobile strategy? I believe it's the "Microsoft or the highway mentality" that's causing the lack of attention on their mobile BI offering. What I mean by that is the non-adoption of Windows Phone 7. That was their platform of choice to delivery mobile BI. Microsoft would never consider adopting another platform because that would just be crazy. The funny thing is, MS already has a platform to choose from. It's called ASP.NET. Throw in some HTML5...

I've been gone far too long and I apologize for that. My energies have been put towards Dashboard Insight but that's no excuse. However, I've told myself I would blog once a week on Fridays again. There's a lot going on in the dashboard and business intelligence world and, as always, there's some buzz words floating around that tries to make something old sound new. We've lived through the Web 2.0 and now we're experiencing the Cloud and, the topic of this blog post, Big Data. What is so special about big data? People are concerned that the amount of data...

Some of you may be aware that I have moved on to a new position at Dashboard Insight.  In any case, it has been a fun ride as the product manager for Dundas Dashboard. I had the pleasure to work with a talented group of developers and I know the product will continue down the path I contributed to. I'm excited about my new role at Dashboard Insight as Research Director. I look forward to utilizing my product management background to the site. In addition, my mandate is to increase the quality of the content and to contribute to the overall...

Last Thursday, I started my trip to China with my parents. They have never been back since they left 30 years ago. I organized this because I felt this would probably be the last time they would be healthy enough to make the 13 hour flight across the world. It has been a wonderful experience so far; in particular, it was very emotional seeing my mom and dad meet some very old friends. In any case, I haven't had a chance to sit down and post a blog but on to the world of data visualization and dashboards. Dundas recently...

Visualizing dynamic data is an aesthetic and readability challenge in data visualization. In most cases, the amount of data will change depending on how the user interacts with the visualization...

My colleague's, Nelson Ng, data visualization blog posted an interesting video on TED talks - The Birth of A Word.  The study was quite fascinating but not as interesting as the visualization Deb Roy demonstrated in the video.  It's called a wordscape. In short, this visualized where a particular word was being used in the house.  The 'threads' represent the travel path of Roy's child.  This visualization represented the usage of the word 'water.'  The biggest spikes, not surprisingly, are in the kitchen. From a more technical perspective, the dimension is geospatial and the height is the measure.  There are other applications...

Dashboard Insight is holding a survey on the overall dashboard user experience.  I'm glad to hear they are doing something like this and sharing their findings with the public.  It will be interesting to see the report when it comes out.  I'm really interested in how people are interacting with their data and how useful their dashboards are in their decision making process. Anyways, feel free to share your experiences with Dashboard Insight, as well.

I have these moments where I am inspired to cook something from scratch.  This Saturday, I decided to make Vietnamese beef noodle soup, better known as phở bò, from scratch (minus the rice noodles - that would have taken too much work and the purchase of new cooking tools).   Like with any dish, a recipe is needed.   For whatever reason, I started thinking about recipes about implementing a concept or doing an activity.  In particular, I was thinking about all the "recipes" out there for dashboard designs - there are not many.  This brought me down the path of why...

There's this interesting challenge that pops up here and there when it comes to visualizing data from a database; however, it applies to any data source.  Consider the following data set: Month Measure Value Jan 2010 ...

As I mentioned last week, I was attending a conference on data visualization.  One of the visualizations that really stuck out was something called a TimeEdgeTree.  This was a visualization created by Michael Burch and Daniel Weiskopf of the University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany. The purpose of this visualization is to visualize hierarchical data over time.  In short, the nodes of the tree represent the hierarchical member, the horizontal (or vertical depending on the orientation of the visualization) axis represents the time period, and different heights and color represent the measure values. I've provided a simplified diagram to help with explaining this...

Teo Lachev, a MS MVP and a MSBI guru, has written a review (free registration required) on how Microsoft OLAP and Dundas Dashboard complement each other.  Here's a synopsis from Teo's website: " With Dundas Dashboard, you can also build analytical dashboards to let users create interactive, web-based reports from OLAP databases, such as Microsoft Analysis Services, as I will show you in this article." Enjoy!