DIG Bits & Bytes

Some items that have fallen on the blogging scraps floor from the last couple of weeks:

BEA AquaLogic Product Future

There have been a lot of rumblings of the future of the AquaLogic product suite, primarily because of the rumor that the professional services group from BEA is folding into WebLogic team. A component of the platform, among other things, is a set of Web 2.0 technologies and Enterprise social computing. It would be surprising to see these products go away based on the current market, but stranger things have happened.

Sharing Information to Make Decisions

After September 11th, the intelligence community was chastised for their lack of information sharing. The “need to know” culture impeded sharing nuggets of knowledge that could help the different intelligence departments make better decisions. To change this mentality, the CIA developed the Intellipedia platform. The CIA will be sharing their story at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week in Boston. It is certainly an interesting case study of how an organization, public or private, can leverage social computing to improve information sharing and collaboration.

And Finally, For the Artistic Crowd

I happened across this site “Dashboards by Example”, which provides a wealth of information for those considering implementing a dashboard within your organization. There are some great examples and best practices crossing a broad range of subject areas including web analytics with Google Analytics (we are a user and big fan) to an IT related dashboard. The author provides his perspective on Dashboards versus Scorecards which is always an interesting topic for debate.

Dashboard Competition

For all of those Tufte wannabes out there, BonaVista Systems has created an interesting dashboard competition. There are some requirements to enter, such as the dashboard must be developed in Excel and use their Microcharts product (great marketing move). Seeing that I am like a caveman when it comes to visually designing a business dashboard, I figured I would share the competition with others since there is no chance I can win the first place prize, an Apple iPhone.

Let me know if anyone submits an entry. I will provide some free publicity to those daring enough to jump into the competition.

See Data, Feel Data, Touch Data...for free?

Much has already been said about the growth of free alternatives to Microsoft Office - between Google, Zoho and others, the competition leads predictably to questioning the incumbent as well as continued innovation from Redmond.

Meanwhile, Google may also be seeking to make a dent in the area of data visualization. Building on last year's acquisition of Gapminder's Trendanalyzer, Google released a data visualization API, essentially a platform to create interesting displays based on structured data stored in Google Docs.

Initially, there's simply a "cool" factor at work here - "If I could get that salary list, I could post a piles-of-money gadget around the office!" But are there competitive implications? It's interesting that for as many years as it's taken for real on-line competition for Office to emerge, there could be a viable alternative in the much younger data visualization space much sooner.

There are so many questions - What are Google's long-term intentions in this space? Will it be a drag for the leading BI vendors, or will it help popularize the concept and "raise all boats"? Will Google's experience in search engines mean we can expect it to lead the way with unstructured data visualization?

Lowering the Bar for Data Visualization

The luxury watchmaker Romain Jerome has created a $300,000 watch. For billionaires to tell time? Not exactly - the watch doesn't actually tell you the time. What's more, it sold out in 48 hours!

So what does the watch actually do?

“With no display for the hours, minutes or seconds, the Day&Night offers a new way of measuring time, splitting the universe of time into two fundamentally opposing sections: day versus night.”

Day versus night, huh? And it sells out for an unbelievable price?

I'm going to start working on a new dashboard project, directed at CEOs of multi-billion dollar firms.

It won't have KPI's, trends, links or navigation; all it will do is flash two words - either "MAKING MONEY" or "LOSING MONEY".

Next I'll develop a separate version to sell sports teams - a new scoreboard that flashes only whether the home team is "WINNING," "LOSING" OR "TIED".