Some dashboards are all glitz and glamour, but offer little once the novelty wears off.
If you're taken aback by that statement, be sure to catch Synergy thought leader, Gill Staniland, as she unpacks it at this year's annual ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit, in March.
"Dashboards are so last week. Visualisation is the order of the day. And then there are those infographics," says Staniland, quickly pointing out that this is said "slightly tongue in cheek". The aim, she says, is to highlight the fast-changing nature of BI.
"Dashboards were touted as the next big thing in BI, but many companies are still to truly reap the promised benefits."
Staniland's topic at the summit is titled: "Designing dashboards for maximum impact" and she will draw heavily from an e-book she wrote ('Dashboards that mean business'), which features in Synergy's BI Master Class series launched in 2012.
Staniland has been tinkering with data for almost 30 years. From the early days of punch cards and scaling mountains as a land surveyor, she has earned her stripes as a software developer, data warehouse designer, data modeller and Cognos consultant. She now consults on a wide range of BI topics, including business analysis, information architecture, strategy, process, visualisation and BI job design.
Staniland believes BI is essential to any successful business, and needs to be tackled in a pragmatic, imaginative yet business-relevant way. BI is that much sought-after bridge between business and IT, making sure the whole organisation reaps the rewards of all those machines and bytes humming away in the server room.
For the summit, she will focus on dashboards and data visualisation, which she says brings a company's expensive and interesting data to life.
"The old adage, 'a picture is worth a thousand words', sums it up," she says. "Business executives don't have the time nor the appetite for making sense out of flat cross-tabs filled with numbers to the n-th decimal place. The ability to present the data to show clear patterns or correlations that might otherwise go unnoticed is the ultimate goal."
But, of course, there is no magic wand and companies face challenges when it comes to effective data visualisation.
"Probably the biggest challenge is changing the perception that dashboard development and data visualisation is a purely technical exercise, which can be performed by an expert SQL developer," she points out. Instead, she says, it is a collaboration, a meeting of minds of business, analysts, BI professionals and even a Web designer, which broadens the reach of the upcoming summit to include role-players from a range of disciplines.
The summit, billed as one of the best local BI conferences, will include keynotes from global BI gurus and local industry leaders. International speakers are Mark Madsen, president and founder of Third Nature, and Lawrence Corr, director of DecisionOne Consulting. Local speakers also on the bill include Barry Devlin from 9sight Consulting, and Julian Ardagh, CEO of Effective Intelligence, along with Staniland, Synergy's principal BI consultant.
In addition, a wide selection of success stories will be highlighted, and attendees will be able to select sessions in the business and technical tracks that will give them pertinent and practical information.
The summit will also feature interactive half-day workshops - "Agile dimensional modelling" and "Reinventing information architecture for business analytics" - as well as a comprehensive BI expo, showcasing the latest BI products and solutions.
Click here to access the programme for the event and take advantage of the early-bird offer.
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