Finally getting around to some of those videos we promised to make, and this latest one is a brief walkthrough of the Visual KPI v4 user interface. Now, I could write a nice little overview of what you’re about to see, but wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of having video? Take a look…
You can also find this video and others on the Transpara YouTube Channel.
Mobile business intelligence continues to grow as a hot topic in almost all industries, but we see just as many people screwing it up as we see people getting it right. One of the biggest mistakes we see people make is putting the wrong data on users’ devices.
The best way to understand this problem is to look at what you already do on your mobile phone and compare that to what you do on your PC or Mac. Can they do many of the same things? Yes. Is that how you use them? Probably not. Here are some of the most successful mobile applications:
So what characteristics define success on mobile vs. success on other devices like your PC?
Here’s the problem: many people consider mobile BI just a mobile version of traditional BI. They approach a mobile BI project as an effort to cram their existing BI tools and reports onto the nearest device as if it were a clown car, and this most often fails. They are different and should be treated as such.
So what are the key types of data that are truly meant for the mobile device? While the answer is very broad and is unique to every business, there are some key characteristics that can help us narrow down what we should be looking at:
Just like defining the right role, choosing the right data to put in front of people is critical to the success of any mobile business intelligence deployment. Taking your existing business intelligence data (which is often more focused on longer-term planning and reporting) and trying to shove it onto a mobile device can be not only painful but also highly ineffective.
Want to know more? Learn more about Visual KPI.
Maybe it’s time for Enterprise IT to learn a lesson from the Consumer space.
In a previous post, we argued that a backlash is brewing in the enterprise because the consumer App Store model just won’t work in many businesses. Consider this the other side of that story…
Enterprise IT has long held the notion that the data they sequester behind corporate firewalls, tokens, and cumbersome multi-factor authentication is so valuable that draconian measures are justified when allowing access to the data by the business users. Business uses regularly tell me that they are tired of IT and its weary “no soup for you!” approach. These business folks are not interested in all the reasons why their reasonable requests for data access are “difficult” or “impossible,” they simply want to use the data stored in corporate systems to help them make timely, fact-based decisions which ultimately serves their company more effectively.
These business users can’t understand why they easily have secure access to their personal digital media from anywhere in the world (and on any device they wish) and yet have almost no access to corporate data once they leave the confines of their cubicle and its wired-in desktop. It reminds me of the early factory-worker days when time clocks and micromanagement ruled the day; where being seen sitting at your desk like Bob Cratchit was more important than getting something accomplished. Those days are long gone but certain Ebenezer Scrooge attitudes linger in IT to this day.
The workplace has been increasingly democratized as information began to flow more freely between peers as well as up and down the management hierarchy and the supply chain. Today’s workers are expected to analyze situations and make intelligent choices about solving problems on a daily basis. Workers at all levels now routinely use information about their company, its operations, strengths and weaknesses to more cleverly deliver results to feed the maw of analysts and the quarterly earnings-driven world of Wall Street. These workers NEED this corporate information to do their jobs, yet they are rarely sitting at their desk pondering their flat screen. They are offsite at planning sessions, or they are traveling to another site, or they are on call on a weekend. Regardless of what took them away from their desk, every hoop we make business users jump through means less time actually devoted to problem-solving!
The tail has been wagging the dog for long enough. It is time for Enterprise to IT take advantage of the advances in consumer-facing security and data delivery to help business users accomplish their work faster and with better information at their fingertips. In fact, they may not have a choice in the very near future since many of our large customers have stopped issuing company-provided smartphones and started adopting a corporate policy of “Bring-your-own-device (BYOD).” Essentially companies are lowering operating costs by shifting the burden of accounting for corporate use of smartphones to the employees and using a reimbursement model to repay employees for business use of their personal devices. Some people have even speculated that the primary reason for BYOD is to break the stranglehold that IT has on corporate data. This has significant implications for Enterprise IT:
This “consumerization” of the business will happen whether Enterprise IT is ready or not, so smart organizations are gearing up for this. They are focusing their IT gurus on delivering secure web access to any portable device, on demand and driven by business needs, not corporate paranoia.
Look at the world of mobile business applications and all of the people that write/blog about them and one thing becomes clear: “Mobile BI” has a buzz right now. So does “mobile dashboards,” “mobile operations monitoring,” “mobile alerts” and a few others. This has prompted the obvious questions of late: “which one are you (meaning Visual KPI)?”
The question doesn’t come from customers very often because, a) they make up their own terms and don’t seem to care what we or “the industry” seem to call this stuff, and b) they are always right. It comes more often from analysts, bloggers, partners and competitors. Either way, it has been on our mind lately so I thought it deserved a few words.
The easy answer is d) all of the above. This is correct, but let’s look into it in as simple a way as possible:
Why we fit this definition: at its most root level, BI is all about decision support. Getting great data to help you make better decisions. Add mobile to it and it’s all about getting the right data to the right person at the right time on the right device and in context. This is our bread and butter. It’s what we live for.
Why we don’t fit this definition: from an industry perspective, BI has a long history in software and a set of applications have become synonymous with BI, including data warehouses, OLAP cubes, and sophisticated data processing. Each of these implies you are the master source of data, and this is where Visual KPI is different. We say leave your data where it already lives, get the most from it, and do everything to avoid a huge deployment project.
Verdict: Visual KPI is mobile BI because mobile business intelligence is not just traditional BI on mobile devices.
Why we fit this definition: The literal definition of a dashboard is a panel of instrumentation and controls which is basically the same as decision support. In the software world, this usually means a screen or set of screens with graphical representations of data that can give you the information you need at a glance. 
On all of these fronts, Visual KPI is a clear fit. Scorecards, heat maps, KPIs, roll-up/pie charts, etc. Traditional dashboard software often pulls data from many sources which is also something Visual KPI does.
Why we don’t fit this definition: As with mobile BI, dashboards have some legacy baggage they bring with them into the mobile world (right or wrong). In the world of traditional BI, dashboard software was usually a toolkit that you could use to design a dashboard as a front-end to your data warehouse or other data source. Dashboard implementations still involved coding and a multi-month project, etc. Visual KPI is not a toolkit but a finished application. It is all data driven with no screens to build, and it uses Microsoft Excel as its design environment so there is no coding. If a customer knows what they want to see and where to get it (data source), and how it is arranged (hierarchy), a Visual KPI deployment can happen in hours. This is why we can deploy an enterprise-class server application on a free trial.
Verdict: Visual KPI is mobile dashboard and alerting software. It sheds the big project, custom coding a design work and was built for mobile from the start, but it delivers a great dashboard experience for operations or other parts of a data-driven business. We also don’t require a local app on the phone, but that’s another story altogether.
Why we fit this definition: This one is much easier. First, everything about this is a fit. We are mobile. Our sweet spot is operations and fast-moving and fast-changing data. We always show the most current data and alert you when things go wrong, or right, or whenever you want us to. Like other monitoring tools, we can read data from the source (or many of them) and we present results clearly for making fast decisions with context.
Why we don’t fit this definition: For the most part Visual KPI is clearly an operations monitoring and alerting application, but like the terms above there is already a monitoring software industry that might have some opposing views on it. The most obvious monitoring scenario that comes to mind is data center monitoring or Network Operations Center (NOC) monitoring. Much of this software is tailor-made for large screens, involves huge projects to deploy and often includes 7-figure price tags. We clearly differ on price, deployment time, and mobility.
Verdict: Visual KPI is mobile operations monitoring, and could also be called lightweight operations monitoring software if you use it on the desktop.
Mobile data visualization, mobile MES, mobile SCO, and many others. There are a host of other terms we could do this analysis on but really, what’s the point? As I mentioned at the top of the article, the customer is really the only one who matters. One of ours even calls us “Blackberry PI” because they use Visual KPI to put OSIsoft PI System data on their Blackberries.
The real question is: what do you think? We would love to hear some other opinions on this.
PharmaManufacturing.com – July 9, 2011
Today, companies such as Transpara and DASGIP are offering solutions that place all of your critical bioprocess data, complete with alarms and trending, in near real-time on your smart device. An example of pushing the envelope today would be Genentech in South San Francisco, which has deployed the Transpara solution.
One senior engineer at Genentech has told me, “I was at the base camp of Mt. Everest, and with my Blackberry, I was able to check the pH of one of my bioreactors.” More…
Thursday, June 24, 2011
Transpara released Visual KPI version 4, a major new update to our mobile monitoring, mobile BI, analytics and alerting software. Below are a few of the news outlets and blogs that posted articles about the new software:
Information Management – June 23, 2011
Visual KPI 4.0 includes new features such as the reorganization of views and scorecards into collapsible groups, pre-defined and ad hoc monitoring of values, enhanced context and guidance URL links, connections to more data sources, and a new user interface.
We were just notified that a recent guest-post was published on Dashboard Insight today. In it we discuss something our customers have brought up many times: Mobile “apps,” and more importantly the app-store model currently used for consumer apps is starting to look way less exciting in the enterprise. Consumers, who are effectively running their own IT department, have found amazing value in this model. Businesses who have their own IT shop and the associated standards, security requirements, compatibility issues, procurement rules, regulatory requirements and application management issues are quickly learning to hate the app-store model.
We put our customers’ and our own thoughts together and you can read it here: http://www.dashboardinsight.com/articles/new-concepts-in-business-intelligence/mobile-bi-and-the-coming-enterprise-app-backlash.aspx
Visual KPI 4.0 Delivers Real-time Monitoring, Alerts and Analytics to Over 400 Smartphones, Tablets and Web Browsers
Transpara Corporation, a mobile business intelligence (BI) leader, today released Visual KPI version 4.0, the most significant update since the product’s introduction in 2005. A web-based software application, Visual KPI provides decision makers with real-time access to critical operations data on any web-enabled device – including iPhone / iPad, Blackberry, Android, Windows Phone, PC, Mac and more. Visual KPI 4.0 breaks away from the limitations of traditional dashboards and scorecards to now provide users with the unprecedented flexibility to navigate, monitor and interact with fast-moving data.
Visual KPI 4.0 has simplified how users implement and design front-end BI solutions, eliminating the expense and time previously needed for dashboard and scorecard projects. Visual KPI 4.0 is the only browser-based mobile BI solution that allows users to monitor metrics from almost any data source and on any mobile device, without coding or changing mobile security requirements. With its innovative Microsoft Excel™ -based design environment, Visual KPI can be deployed in less than a day and allows users to rapidly create KPIs, scorecards, trends and alerts in a single web-based experience to enable faster decision making from any location.
“We went from a static dashboard to a mobile, dynamic dashboard in a matter of minutes,” said Kenneth Young, Director of Asset Management for NaturEner, a renewable energy company with six operational solar and wind plants in U.S., Canada and Spain. “With our unique business model, we’re currently adapting to changes in the regulatory environment and marketplace and Visual KPI gives us the flexibility to have exactly the information we need on our mobile devices, like notifications and alarms for regulatory scores or offline turbines. Installing Visual KPI gave us easily accessible, actionable data available anytime anywhere.”
Visual KPI 4.0 delivers added power and flexibility in how users organize and model business metrics without sacrificing simplicity. New features include:
· New look – a whole new user experience improved for touch-screen devices and tablets. Clearly defined tabs and graphical representation of information offer enhanced navigation, while allowing customers to accommodate new data types.
· Attribute-driven groups with unlimited levels – Views and scorecards have been collapsed into unlimited “groups” for easy organization of KPIs, alerts and values. Visual KPI 4.0 shows a customer’s entire asset hierarchy (e.g. geographic region, business unit, equipment type) at a glance, no matter how sophisticated.
· Values – pre-defined and ad-hoc monitoring of values (metrics that lack the target behavior and defined limits of a KPI), along with mobile KPIs and trends. This creates simplified operations monitoring for any executive or operational user.
· Links – enhanced context and guidance with links to any URL-addressable system. Links can point to applications (e.g. MES, ERP, CRM) where the users will take action, instructional documents or external data sources for comparisons, all of which make Visual KPI almost infinitely extensible.
· More data sources – Visual KPI connects to almost any data source without creating a new master source to manage. This includes data historians (e.g. OSIsoft PI, Invensys Wonderware), databases, other BI or data warehouse solutions, manufacturing or line-of-business applications (e.g. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics) and web services.
· Subscription pricing and new versions: Visual KPI 4.0 is now available in Starter, Pro and Enterprise versions. It runs on the customer’s server (on-premise or hosted; physical or virtual machine), and subscription pricing starts at $19 per user per month.
“Our goal was to further blur the line between the flexibility and security of a web-based application that can support almost any device and the perceived speed and user experience of dedicated mobile apps,” said Michael Saucier, CEO of Transpara. “Enterprise customers have become very vocal against the lack of manageability, compatibility and control of the consumer mobile app store model and Visual KPI 4.0 seems to have answered their call. The response has been outstanding and we can’t wait to get it in everyone’s hands… literally.”
About Transpara Corporation
Transpara’s Visual KPI is mobile BI monitoring and alerting software for operationally-driven companies in industries such as energy, oil and gas, data center, financial services and manufacturing. Visual KPI monitors operations information from multiple, existing data sources and delivers KPIs, scorecards, trends, dashboards and alerts to any device. By helping users discover problems and opportunities before it’s too late, Visual KPI supports real-time decision making for improved performance, reduced operating costs and lowered business risk. Visit www.transpara.com for more information.
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Transpara is a registered trademark of Transpara Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Download PDF: Transpara Announces New Version of Mobile BI Software
A few weekends ago, Michael and I were gathered here at the EMEA HQ in Basel, Switzerland and we were waiting patiently for some UI changes in the new Visual KPI v4 so we could make a real product video. That’s a lie. We aren’t patient about anything. To pass the time, and to avoid the hundred other things we needed to accomplish (like finishing our still unfinished cool new demo – coming soon), we created this fun little video.
Special thanks to the folks at Xtranormal for making such a fun tool. Enjoy!
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