To Kevin Brown, most business intelligence dashboards are like stock market tickers. They tell you how much a stock went up or down, but not much more. Brown, Vice President of Alliances and Partnerships for Tableau Software, a developer of visual analysis software, believes that dashboards should go further than that. You should be able to identify why the stock went up, and what might happen next.
In essence, Brown believes there's a whole new way of looking at business intelligence. In this Q&A, he talks about pushing the boundaries of BI to so that it can offer even more insight than before.
Q: What's wrong with today's BI dashboards?
A: Dashboards are really just a visual representation of static information. I don't care if it's a gauge or a pie chart, it simply tells you what happened, but it doesn't let you go any further.
Q: But they're certainly more helpful than past options, where you might have had to submit database queries.
A: That may be, but they're really no more helpful than the indicator lights in your car, which is where we got the term dashboard. It only tells you that something is wrong - it doesn't tell you what it is or what caused it.
Q: What do you envision as an improvement?
A: Dashboards should be living and breathing entities that viewers with permission can change or manipulate. People want to ask follow-up questions, to widen or narrow their view. They may want to see the last three weeks, not just the last 24 hours. They want to look at information over multiple product definitions, sales territories or price ranges.
Q: That sounds like a difficult IT challenge.
A: And that's the problem with current BI architectures. How can you create dashboards for all of the different needs for all the different people when you're programmatically designing dashboards and creating the filters and permissions for them? You wind up in a situation where you constantly have to recreate and reprogram these dashboards.
Q: What do you see as the alternative?
A: You should give people access to a broad range of data and allow them to manipulate or mold it to their needs. Just as Dataupia recommends, we need to have data available en masse in real time so that it can swiftly accessed through a dashboard interface, so that it's organized and stored and available for analysis.
There needs to be more self-service in the data warehouse. You take a robust data warehouse and add an application like the one that Tableau makes, and you give users access to the information. You eliminate the middle layer of needs analysis, design documents and programming that slows everyone down. What you get is information you can view, change and analyze in real time.
Q: Why is this shift in thinking about BI so important?
A: This is the way the world's going. Thanks to the Internet, most information is online and real-time. We're dealing with massive surge of data that's coming at us like a fire hose. You have to start interacting with all that information in a way that's more productive.
Kevin Brown is Tableau Software's Vice President of Alliances and Partnerships. A 25-year veteran of the software industry, Kevin has held executive leadership positions in several prominent companies and has extensive experience starting new companies. He was also a Professor of Computer Science at Boston College and has authored four books on Lotus Notes. He holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. from Boston College.
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