I've been working on a project with a couple of friends to bring data analysis to a broader audience. There are many Business Intelligence (BI) tools that target large businesses and
require a major
investment in time, money and internal resources. Surely the power
of BI doesn’t
need to be limited to that context! There are literally millions
of people who
have data that they want to summarize and visualize in ways beyond
Excel’s
ability, but who don’t have the IT skills required by the BI tools
we are used
to. But how could the functionality of the big BI vendors be made
available in
an appropriate format for the rest of the world – for the average
individual, community
organisation, church, sports club, or small business?
- You’d need to keep it cheap
and simple.
- Host the system in the
cloud so that the users
don’t have the hassle of maintaining IT infrastructure or managing
software.
- Start with what people
know. They already know
about tables of numbers and graphs – though perhaps with a
confused understanding
of what chart type to use when. There’s a good chance they already
know about
the use of color-coding to distinguish between good and bad
values. Thanks to
Facebook they already know about online conversations. So build
the simplest
tool that allows them to apply that knowledge to their existing
data sets.
- Lead people forward over
time. Build additional
features into that framework so that users can easily learn as
they go and
gradually take advantage of more advanced types of analysis.
The initial reaction to the release of
OTUS Analytics Dashboards
shows that
this approach is gaining traction. All sorts of people are trying
out the
hosted dashboard functionality of OTUS Analytics. They can
securely upload data
and very quickly layout dashboards to their own design. The
dashboards can
display any assortment of
tables, charts, color-coded performance indicators and explanatory text. It's easy to create
scorecards and
strategy maps. Groups of users can view the same dashboards
and discuss
what they see.
Being a hosted system, features can easily be
added over
time without requiring users to perform any upgrade
re-installations. We’ve recently
extended the range of chart types, added heat maps, and will soon
introduce gauges.
Let me know if you'd like more info.
