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- What were your needs when you chose Bime™?

We were looking for a “easy-to-use” tool, with a user friendly interface for developers and good visualization possibilities to create flexible and “flashy” dashboards. All without expensive start-up costs like hardware installations and high license fees.

- How has Bime ™ responded to these needs?

Bime has perfectly matched these needs. Without any training at all, the experienced BI developers were able to create dashboards and retrieve data from several sources.

- What level of added value has Bime ™ brought to your job / your business?

As a vendor of solutions other than consulting and executive search services, we have created several dashboards which we offer our clients. Besides this, we’ve created a number of demo versions which we can show easily at any time and any place to visualize the power of good BI-tooling. Our clients love the flexible way we can create a simple pilot at “run-time” based on their own data.

Eclectic is also developing reports and dashboards for internal use, e.g. weekly finance reporting, CRM-reporting, sales performance reports and a sustainability dashboard.

- Why did you choose to also become a partner of Bime™?

One of the items of our vision for BI is that the choice of easy-to-use BI-tools is the basis for the success of BI within the organization. Although BI is not just tooling, the choice for the right tooling will empower the business and place them in the “driver’s seat”. This is what BI is all about, while the IT-department is the supporting party. Bime is a tool which has these capabilities, and the potential for the next period is even more exciting!

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If you are a current user of Bime, do you have something to say about how it has helped you and your business? If so, please send your thoughts and case studies to contact@wearecloud.com, and you could see your name and company posted up here very soon!!

Here are some photos of some of the team in our new space!

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Data is often used to confirm the truth or disperse myths. So it pretty much goes without saying that people love it when data proves what they have been saying or doing all along. As Dan Holowack states in his blog: “Change often costs money, change is hard, change sometimes means admitting mistakes”. So it makes sense that if you need to initiate change in your organization, an activity often met with a little resistance, then wielding data that proves the need for change seems like an appropriate way to begin.

Adapted from a presentation presented by Brian Postl, President and CEO of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, here are the 5 stages of data denial.

1. The Data is Wrong

A lot of the time your initial reaction can be: “the data must be wrong”. If this is what springs to mind, it is advisable to take a step back and take a look at the overall result. Is it at least close to what it should be? If so, this could be enough to leverage action; don’t spend too much time worrying over the finer details.

2. The Data is Old

Another classic excuse. Does the data really need to be up-to-the-minute, real time data? That all depends on your industry and what you are doing with your data. But chances are, that data that is a little dated still holds some value and truth. Don’t dismiss it just yet.

3. We Have Already Changed

As long as you can show that the changes have been made, this one does not count as a denial. At least the organization has acknowledged the fact that they need to improvements and have started to think about, if not implement, actionable changes. Questions to ask yourself: What changes have we made? How are these reflected in the data? Make sure you can confirm the changes in the new data.

4. This is a Different Place

Just because your organization does not fall into a particular area, or does or doesn’t outsource work to another country, don’t think you can escape by playing the location card. Make use of data by trying to find commonalities to support best practices instead of comparing where you both fell down.

5. We Already Tried That

As we said before, it is hard to get an organization to initiate change, let alone get it right the first time. Especially if previous attempts at change were unsuccessful. Look at your data carefully – are there things you missed last time, or things that have changed that can give you more insight or opportunities?

The best way to deal with data denial – start with a small change, something you can measure, share and celebrate the success. Or the other alternative is to try to avoid it completely – start analyzing your data early on with a BI solution like Bime. Because you can ask any question you want, you are able to quickly uncover where things are going wrong before you have to enter the denial stages.

He has narrowed it down to thirteen potential targets for readers to vote on in his poll, one of which is Salesforce.com, the leading SaaS enterprise cloud computing company. Coming under “Pricey Buys in Hot Markets”, I think Salesforce.com is probably a little out of Oracle’s reach at this point in time.

Opinions are divided judging by the comments the post has received: with names such as IBM, Google and Yahoo floating around, some are confident that Oracle has the power to capture the market’s biggest players. EMC is also a popular choice with the expectation that Oracle would take first place in the data storage business on top of NetApp, and despite not making Jannise’s list, NetApp also makes an appearance as a potential acquiree.

Personally I think Oracle are sitting comfortably on Sun Microsystems for their servers and storage activity so may choose to invest in another, weaker area as some other readers suggested, in order to provide a more complete technology stack. Having said that, they may equally wish to secure their place in the market by building on an already successful acquisition… We’ll just have to wait and see.

What do you think? Post your opinion as a comment, or take a look at Jannise’s poll.

A dashboard or scorecard interface finally makes it easy for a majority of users to quickly find, analyze, and explore the information they need to perform their daily tasks.

There is a subtle distinction between a scorecard and dashboard. Each tool merges elements from the other, but at a high level they both target specific and different levels of the business decision making process.

At the highest, most strategic level of the decision making spectrum sit scorecards. Scorecards display periodic snapshots of performance associated with an organization’s strategic objectives and plans. The goal of the scorecard is to keep the business focused on a common strategic objective by making comparisons within your department, company and/or industry to indicate your direction. The primary measurement used in a scorecard is the key performance indicator. These key performance indicators are often a composite of several metrics or other KPIs that measure the organization’s ability to execute a strategic objective.

The common industry perception is that a dashboard displays information about a company at a given point in time that can be used to make better business decisions. Dashboards fall down one level from a scorecard in the decision making process; as they are less focused on a strategic objective and more tied to specific operational goals. An operational goal may contribute directly to one or more higher level strategic objectives. Within a dashboard, the execution of the operational goal itself becomes the focus, not the strategy. The purpose of a dashboard is to provide the user with actionable business information in a format that is both insightful and intuitive. Dashboards leverage their data primarily in the form of metrics and KPIs.

When we were doing our research, we stumbled across Dan Holowack’s blog. He provides us with a metaphorical solution to our problem that might help you better remember the differences between the two:

Imagine for a moment that you’re driving a car…

DASHBOARD

All the instruments in your center console are displaying current-state information. The speedometer says you’re traveling 45 km/h and the RPM gauge is at 3000. The odometer tracks and displays total distance traveled and a fuel gauge says you’re at half a tank. All these indicators display information for a ‘single point in time’.

SCORECARD

Knowing all this dashboard information is great, but here’s why you need a scorecard… you’re heading straight for a BRICK WALL (10 seconds to impact). It’s fascinating how the dashboard can give you so much information, but it’s all quite useless without the support of Scorecards. Consider the Scorecard to be your own eyes. You notice you’re passing all the other drivers on the road and decide to slow down (for fear of a speeding ticket!). Similar to how you compare cars on the road, the Scorecard should make comparisons within your department, company and/or industry to indicate your direction (are you heading for a brick wall?).

Source: Dan Holowack, Love Data Intelligence blog

A nice little round-up for this post comes from TDWI : “Whereas a dashboard informs users what they are doing, a scorecard tells them how well they are doing. In other words, a dashboard records performance while a scorecard charts progress. In short, a dashboard is a performance monitoring system, whereas a scorecard is a performance management system.”