If you are planning to be at the BI2012 event next week and want to meet up I will be on-hand Tuesday and Thursday. On Thursday morning, I will conduct an advanced workshop on dashboard design where I will address all of the hard questions that new and advanced developers have.
Here is a Podcast I recorded with Scott from WISPubs to introduce one of the topics I will discuss: Dashboard Data Overload… Sounds exciting!!
LISTEN TO PODCAST
Hope to see you there!
Today, I created a new Facebook profile that I wanted to share with the community, which will be a permanent channel for collaborating with the community. As you may also notice, you can comment on this blog using your Facebook account, and I will now reply directly from Facebook. The results should make this blog a more social and engaging experience for everyone.
This year I wanted to maximize my time and work smarter, so I can invest my time on more important tasks.. like blogging! As a technologist, I am a firm believer that anything that can be digitalized, should be. Anyone who works with me knows that I am constantly trying to figure out ways to automate and simplify redundant tasks.
A few weeks ago, I added a couple of new products to increase our productivity:
1. Shoeboxed- Hours of organizing receipts are gone for ever. When I get a email receipt, I simply forward it to my address or when Kinkos gives me a printed receipt, I take a picture with it using the Shoeboxed App. Everything is digitalized and converted. At any time I can print out a neatly organized PDF with all of my receipt images. In addition, they have an email-to-mail service that will save me a drive to the UPS store… brilliant!
2. ScheduleOnce.com- This is a tool that I implemented that I believe Google needs to acquire and add as a standard GMail service. This solution solves the back and forth email chain for scheduling meetings. Now, I simply send one email with a link. My customers/partners pick out a time that woks for them and the meeting is automatically scheduled. If multiple members of my team need to be in a meeting, I have a special URL for that too. Now I can get meetings scheduled quicker with less email clutter.
What technology tools do you use to increase productivity life?
Over the last few months, I have been a regular visitor to Josh Tapley’s blog, http://data-ink.com/. His natural design aesthetic coupled with technique is something I admire, and his willingness to share with the community is something that should be appreciated by anyone who is using his tools/techniques.
I reached out to Josh to learn more about him and his experience and wanted to share with you:
Q: When did you learn how to approach dashboard design best practices?
A: I learned about Edward Tufte and Stephen Few right before I began using Xcelsius, which significantly impacted my design style. I’m completely self taught utilizing online blogs (EverythingXcelsius, MyXcelsius and HackingSAP) as well as the very active LinkedIn groups.
Q: When did you start using Xcelsius?
A: My first public splash with my Xcelsius work was for the 2010 Reportapalooza. I continued to practice with the software to make sure that I didn’t lose in 2011 (even though that competition never came). During that time, Kalyan Verma asked me to guest blog on his site and I founded my own blog to showcase my work.
Q: What dashboard are you most proud of:
A: Late summer of last year I placed as a winner in the ‘Dig-In’ category for the Strata O’Reilly Conference in a data visualization competition that was judged in part by Juice Analytics. My interactive dashboard was a Xcelsius solution that I built in a single weekend.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Now I’ve left my previous career in health care to join Ron Keler (fellow Xcelsius blogger) as a BI consultant at Cleartelligence specializing in dashboard design.
Make sure you check out and bookmark Josh’s blog: http://data-ink.com/
Today, my team released a free component into our labs page called Input Text. This super-simple component is something that we have used for a long time, and I asked my team to package it up for the community to use and distribute. The driver for this effort was a recent requirement for auto-fill supplied by a customer. Instead of building an auto-fill component, I suggested a technique of combining our input text box with Filtered Summery. The combination worked like a charm and saved the customer thousands of dollars in custom development. From that experience, I wanted everyone to have this new functionality without having to pick up the Xcelsius SDK.
The filtering process is taken care of with Filtered Summary, which allows you to filter thousands of records very quickly as you type in values.
We should have some other incredibly useful templates like this coming soon to the community where we leverage our components with standard Xcelsius functionality to create truly useful experiences.
Last week, I met with Scott Wallask from WISPubs for a webcast focused on data overload. In this short discussion, we focused our attention on common causes for data overload, how business users contribute to the problem, and ways to identify when you have reached data overload. What we didn’t discuss is real technology solutions for addressing data overload. LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
The reality is that end user expectations for what a dashboard should do has evolved, and end users now expect dashboard platforms to include a level of data analysis and exploration above and beyond basic visualization. While this podcast focused heavily on process and user expectations, at some point the discussion needs to transition to technology. Demands for data drill-down, filtering, and pivoting which were once considered ”reporting” or “ad-hoc” features, have made their way into many dashboard platforms. Xcelsius has always allowed developers to create this functionality but with varied success (based on technical skill level). The reality is that as dashboards become more data intensive, executing becomes increasingly difficult.
That is one reason why I have always been such a big fan and ambassador of solutions like Antivia XWIS Advantage. When Xcelsius and XWIS are combined, I still believe the two solutions together elevate Xcelsius back to the top of the list as the best dashboard solution in the market. The flexibility of Xcelsius’ form-design coupled with real data analysis firepower of XWIS is second to none.
In my upcoming presentation in Las Vegas, I will provide techniques and best practices to extend Xcelsius to its absolute limits, and then I will show developers how to take it 3 or 4 steps further with technologies like XWIS to paint a complete picture of what is possible to meet today’s dashboard requirements. LEARN MORE ABOUT MY SESSION
At the tail end of last week there was a bit of dooms-day chatter on Twitter around Xcelsius, and this week I saw two posts from Steve Lucas on Flash Demise and Mobile-First. This activity sparked a lot of buzz and debate on the web. So how could I resist chiming in?
In the next few years, customers will have more choices than ever for how they will approach dashboards and visualization, but they will have to prioritize based on needs and budget. Once again, it will come down to choosing the right tools for the job..
1. Xcelsius with some kind of HTML5 ported option yet to be announced, which we have to assume will be a subset of Xcelsius functionality.
2. SAP mobile enabled solutions like Explorer / Exploration views and BI Mobile (webi mobilized)
3. Xcelsius coupled with a third party offering like Antivia XWIS Anywhere and Exxova MyBI Mobile,
4. Third party mobile visualization products like Roambi.
This list will be prioritized based on the following questions that every customer will need to ask themselves for an entire BI initiative and for specific projects:
I will likely do a full write-up to compare and contrast these approaches once BI4 release pack 3 hits the market this quarter.
So what about Xcelsius?
The reality is that Xcelsius, like any other technology, will have to evolve or be replaced. The “Xcelsius” as we know it, which is a Flash and Excel powered technology wrapped up in an desktop development environment, has a shelf life. SAP is NOT killing off a product, because it is hardly a move that we would expect for a highly successful and profitable technology. The SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards prooduct has a large customer base, thriving community, and a great ecosystem of partners who are continuously innovating platform. What ever the fate of Xcelsius is, SAP’s “Mobile First” is a clear strategy shift that will not happen over night.
Is the future clear or cloudy?
While SAP has sat on Xcelsius, the company’s focus has shifted towards growth opportunities like Big Data, Cloud, Social, and Mobility…it is baked into our brains as SAP customers and partners. There is a common thread here that is critical to the success to all of these initiatives: “End user experiences.”. Most of these strategic growth areas for SAP, have integration back to the core Business Analytics product lines. So the question we all have is what exactly will SAP’s next-generation “mobile first” dashboard solution look like? Will SAP truly innovate in this area? Or will the huge ecosystem of software vendors beat them to the punch?
Let me know what you guys think.
2011 was a fast and furious year in technology. Here are the most important trends that I observed and personally experienced…
Flash Fallout was a huge pain in the neck
The iPad’s original “lack of Flash support” messaging was turned on its head to the point where Adobe announced the end of future development of mobile Flash. It seems Flash moving forward will be optimized as a desktop browser-based technology with innovations around high end 3D graphics processing, video, etc…
Enterprise Mobility was all about iOS
Regardless how many Android devices were activated this year, the iPad was king. I have talked to few customers with corporate supplied devices that were not iPad. Vendors like MeLLmo who went after iOS were spot-on as RIM shares tumbled, Microsoft still can’t get off the ground and Google nips at the heels of Apple. I will have a separate article just on mobility next week to review my 2010 predictions and where I think things are going in 2012.
Location Intelligence gained a lot of steam
An area that I am heavily vested in, both personally and professionally, gained a ton of steam in the enterprise. In 2009-2010, it was a lot of work to convince enterprise customers that Google Maps was capable as an enterprise location intelligence technology; today, it is assumed. Announcements from vendors like Microstrategy, SAP, and others of Google Maps integration instantly validated what I have believed for a long time:
1 . Traditional GIS tools are overkill in many business intelligence requirements.
2. Google Maps is more than suitable as a cloud framework and user experience for presenting location based data
As a result, our GMaps Plugin solution was a smashing success among Xcelsius customers. At the same time, I spent most of my 2010 executing on my mobile location intelligence vision, which you will get to see the results very soon! (http://gmapsmobile.com).
Social Media is everywhere
Linked-In and Pandora were two high profile IPOs, who’s value is primarily derived by activity of large user bases. Facebook reached 800M users and withstood Google + which was once dubbed a “Facebook” killer. Social media this year helped change the world, from overthrowing governments, to organizing on Wall Street. From my perspective, people who are avoiding social media all together are equivalent to those people who held onto rotary phones when touch-tone was introduced.
Enterprise organizations in 2011 took social media and customer activities seriously. For example, when I griped about how much I hate my bank on twitter, I had a customer service person direct messaging me within an hour…impressive. The demand for social media tracking and integration, along with adoption of social media principles behind the firewall are two emerging trends that will continue to heat up going into 2012.
Big Data generated a lot of buzz
Organizations are storing an increasing volume of data at an increasing rate, so the demand for processing and serving this data is a real challenge that enterprise vendors are taking head on. There is tremendous opportunity in this space for hardware and software makers; SAP is all in on their in-memory HANA solution to Big Data.
“The Cloud” went main stream
The “Cloud” also seemed to pick up steam as all of the major enterprise software vendors bolstered “software as a service” offerings. A cautionary event also occurred in 2011 when Amazon’s cloud had a temporary outage paralyzing some vendors. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Apple to name a few are vested in cloud technology as a critical part of their product portfolio.
Steve Jobs Passing
You cannot talk about major technology happenings of 2011 without mentioning Steve Jobs unfortunate death. My second personal computer was a Mac Plus, and I can say that from the day I put a mouse in my hand, I knew it was my future. Steve Jobs was one person and he obviously had an amazing team around him to execute and support his vision. With that said, his passing is a terrible tragedy, because no single figure in recent memory has had such a positive and unique impact on the world as he did. He will certainly be missed…
Stay tuned for 2012
Now that 2012 is upon us, I am excited to see how things progress on all of these fronts. I see continued growth, intense competition, and some bubbles brewing next year. I personally will get to work in all of these areas next year with my own company so I will be reporting back on my real world experiences, disappointments, and victories!!
Happy New Year!
I have long waited for some basic Xcelsius enhancements to produce more useful dashboard applications. Understanding that Xcelsius enhancements to existing components is limited, I wanted to pick out a few that I believe are low hanging fruit to make a large volume of developers a little happier.
Will these enhancements help SAP sell more software? absolutely not..
Will it help new customers who are left to execute after they purchase? YES!
These are very minor tweaks that would alter how people build Xcelsius dashboards for the better. I chose these as my top 3 because they are super simple, and do not make sense as third party solutions.
Some other areas that could use some TLC, but could require some more work for the Xcelsius dev team..
What do you guys think?
“Flash is the NOT the future of the web”. I agree with this statement because today’s “web experience” is designed with iPad in mind. However, Flash/Flex is by no means dead with today’s announcement that Adobe will no longer develop the mobile Flash player.
So while we know that Flash is not the future of the web, I believe that for specialized applications, dashboard visualization, and web animation, Flash has a significantly longer shelf life. We are in an awkward transition period right now because HTML5 does not translate well to sophisticated dashboards and data visualization / discovery… It is just not that simple.
Is HTML5 ready for prime time yet?
Technologies like Javascript, SVG, and HTML5 combined create a powerful alternative to Flash for creating rich web user experiences. However, when it comes to enterprise applications, HTML5 presents a problem in the short term. “Develop once deploy everywhere” right now is nearly impossible with so much fragmentation, specifically if you are wanting to use HTML5.
To prove this point, 70% of you reading this article are NOT using a browser that supports HTML5.. That is a stat that I pulled directly from my Google Analytics page. The adoption and growth of HTML5 will be highly dependent how fast consumers are forced to update/upgrade their desktop browsers, which is a rigid process in the enterprise. For example, 32% of you reading this article are using IE 7 and IE8 which are limited in their support of HTML5 features.
What about Xcelsius?
For Xcelsius, today’s Adobe announcement changes nothing unless you buy into the media storm that declares Apple a winner and Adobe a loser. I have yet to see anything in the marketplace that produces the user experience, design flexibility, and power of Xcelsius specifically designed for SAP BusinessObjects. If mobile is an absolute requirement for your organization, I would not wait around for “Mobile Xcelsius”, but instead evaluate some of the new mobile technologies from SAP and partners.
Today, Xcelsius (SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards) and SAP Explorer are both browser-based, Flash tools. They were never built with mobile in-mind, which is why SAP re-built the Explorer experience as a native iOS app. This process is not as simple for Xcelsius because the user experience for every dashboard application is completely different. Even if I could wave a magic wand and make Xcelsius work on an iPad, it would require some fundamental changes to allow for mobile security, a user experience overhaul for gestures, and somehow re-authoring the Excel engine in another technology.
I have absolutely not counted out Xcelsius, as new partners, community members, and experts continue to join and push the ecosystem forward. As long as I know there is forward development at SAP on this technology, I am still optimistic of its future.
Are there alternatives?
I think Antivia is onto something with their Flexwis which takes advantage of the Flex platform to deploy to Flash on the desktop, and to native iPad / Android apps. Adobe has made incredible strides with their Flex development platform for mobile which looks very promising for this Flexwis platform. For pure mobile reporting/dashboards out the box, Roambi is at the absolute top of my list without any exception. Finally, SAP does have a few brand new mobile reporting/dashboard solutions that I haven’t had time to put through their paces, but look very promising if they deliver as advertised. I will be reporting on them very soon with some good feedback to the community.
What are your thoughts?
I would love to hear your opinions, concerns and questions about today’s announcements, my experiences with building HTML5 apps vs Flash, etc.
