The on-going (and in my view mistaken) obsession with “self-service” seems to lead many people to conclude that “Google is the Nirvana of end-user BI”. By which I think they mean that being able to type any question into a simple text box and get an answer is the best possible interface for asking a business question.
I disagree… both in terms of how you ask the question and in terms of the answer that you get!
Back in September I posted about “The HTML5 future of dashboards” which included a video of an interactive HTML5 dashboard which we had just demonstrated for the first time at the ASUG SBOUC conference in Orlando. The main point of this earlier post was to highlight that dashboards are a lot more than just a selection of summary grids and graphs and that HTML5 is a technology which can happily deliver the new breed of interactive dashboards which go so much further than offering mere “at a glance” summaries of data.
Last week, we hosted what proved to be an extremely popular and very well received educational webinar entitled “If you think you know dashboards, think again“.
During this fast paced, 1-hour session, Donald MacCormick (@donaldmac) explained why interactive dashboards are the future of end-user BI and, in fact, are the only end-user BI tool you need.
Last Friday I saw a tweet which included the comment :-
“pay for dashboard and then pay for add ons!! WTF SAP”
After I scraped myself (and our CEO) off the ceiling, I felt compelled to write (once again) about this strange form of irrationality.
John Freeze over at C5Insight wrote a great post recently titled “Excel Overload How Much is Too Much”. I particularly liked his sign off from the blog:
“I use Excel nearly every day and will continue to do so … I also use my toothbrush daily, and while I could, I don’t try to wash my car with it.”
Just before Christmas I posted a quick quiz of a few of my favorite puzzle questions from over the years. If you have not had a go already you can find the original quiz at :-
http://scn.sap.com/community/bi-dashboards/blog/2012/12/20/a-quick-fire-quiz-for-the-festive-season
Here is a quick-fire puzzle quiz for the festive season, no prizes, just for fun.
It is all about speed. How quickly can you answer all these questions? Nothing too tricky, all answers probably searchable on Google, but where is the fun in that (and you are not going to get through them quickly if you start searching).
Over the last two weeks I posted a series of articles which explained four key lessons which I believe the BBC Weather site teaches us about dashboard design and delivery. For those who didn’t have time to read all four posts in depth, here is a quick summary of what they covered:
This was supposed to be a series of three blog posts exploring the lessons that the BBC weather site can teach us about BI in general and dashboards in particular (the first 3 posts were on the future of dashboards, Big Data and HTML5). However, after finishing the original series I realized there was a fourth lesson staring me in the face, which should have been more obvious than the first three, because it is all about predictive analysis.
Timo Elliott posted a blog a couple of days ago where he explains why he feels investing more in end-user training for BI tools is a good, low-hanging investment.
It is not often I disagree with Timo, but in this instance I do. I have an increasingly strong conviction that the only BI which will ever truly succeed with business end-users is BI which needs no training at all.
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