Where Is My Dashboard Aggregator?
In the old days, somebody running a business had a cadre of middle managers who aggregated data about the performance of different parts of the business. They would typically write monthly reports highlighting trends, issues, and exceptions. In a modern, web-enabled, web-centric business, this role is served by the online dashboards provided by various services. The challenge today is aggregating and integrating those services. I see this challenge in the real world from running ReadWriteWeb's business operations. This gap seems like a good start-up opportunity. Perhaps somebody is already filling it?
Here Are My Dashboards
If you looked at my Firefox toolbar, you would see a number of services essential to running the business. In no particular order:
- Google Analytics,
- Federated Media (our advertising network partner),
- OpenX (which serves the ads that we sell directly),
- Basecamp (for internal project discussions),
- Relenta (my email-based CRM-lite).
I am leaving off this list all of the external news-oriented services that enable me to navigate my canoe down the river of news. I am focusing here on the dashboards for business applications that impact client satisfaction, revenue, and cash flow. ReadWriteWeb runs on SaaS. These services are the mission-critical core of our business. They enable a tiny, reasonably complex business to be managed with minimal overhead (i.e. profitably).
More are coming, too. We are implementing a new SaaS-based accounting system that will come with its own dashboard. We are building new revenue-generating partnerships, each of which will have its own dashboard. This is where things can get out of control. Each of these new dashboards will be important, but each will be just one piece of the overall puzzle.
Here Is the Problem
In a word, "integration" (a.k.a. aggregation). I need to log in to each of these services to extract the information I need and then move on to the next one. That is not a huge problem, but it is a hassle and a time-drain. And time-drains take away from the really important things that grow the business.
Multiple sign-on is not a problem. Well, it would be if I were more security-conscious. The real problem is data integration.
Envisaging the Solution
I envisage something like a start page. I use MyYahoo, but it could just as well be something like Netvibes or Pageflakes. I want to aggregate the services of my choosing and have control over the layout.
This aggregator service of mine should allow me to log in to each of my services (securely, of course). If it did that, I would implement a more secure log-in to the aggregator service itself.
But I would need control at a more granular level than typical start pages provide. Typical start pages give me control over RSS feeds, but I already get all the RSS feeds from the services I'm on. For example, I get all posts from ReadWriteWeb.
If I got every raw data point update from Google Analytics, Federated Media, OpenX, and all my other dashboards, it would be like sipping from a fire hose (i.e. useless).
There needs to be API-level access, so that I can select only the data points I need for each service. I should be able to set ranges and get exception reports. This is what middle managers did so well: "Here is the issue you need to focus on now, boss". I would still need to be able to deep-dive occasionally into an individual service, but my daily dashboard would be this aggregator service.
This feels a bit like what PubSub does. My guess is that the XMPP standard may have a role to play in the solution. But now I am straying from my reservation (requirements) into the badlands of technical solutions...
The other big requirement is that it has to be small-screen friendly, so that I can easily see it on a mobile screen (hint to all you cool iPhone-toting developers: make this Blackberry native-friendly, please -- that is what biz guys use).
Reflections on Enterprise 2.0
I manage an enterprise. Okay, it is a small enterprise. Okay, it is a really small enterprise! But it is a multi-national (we operate globally), and it has multiple revenue lines, so there is some complexity. As a management team, we are small by design. This enables us to be agile and profitable.
I see profit centers in large companies increasingly working the same way.
A business is a business. Adding a few zeros to the end of a report does not change the fundamentals. A large business is increasingly becoming an aggregation of a lot of smaller businesses (with or without synergy, the logic may simply be access to cheap capital).
If that is how this pans out, the winners will be start-ups that sell to small businesses and slip in the back door of large companies guarded by profit-center managers. They'll win bigger than the incumbent big vendors that sell to the CIO and other central-overhead managers. Historically, this is how it has always panned out. Microsoft did not start out selling to the enterprise. It made its mark as a pirate, empowering individuals to do stuff on the PC.
This reflection is prompted by the news that Oracle is buying Sun and by the vision of a world where all enterprise software is sold by three behemoths. Ahem... baloney!
Have You Seen Anything Like This?
Surely other people face this issue? So, somebody must have come up with a solution.
I've seen "SaaS integration" solutions. But they seem overly complex, stuck in the middleware paradigm.
My service will have to be consumer-like in its ease of use. Anything that requires an IT department won't cut it. Perhaps somebody who had built a really cool consumer app that did not solve a real problem or could not be monetized might want to take a crack at this. Or has that person already built one, and I just missed it?
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Bernard, this is what we have in mind at www.rjmetrics.com. I am going to send you more details over email
I want to see something similar where you can run it on your server and it will be a personal web dashboard, where you can aggreate social networking feeds, adsense, adwords, analytics, quick wordpress publishing, etc. Basically create your own web start-page accessible only by you and anyone you wish to share it with.
You forgot a dashboard for Google Alerts in your list, a tool that we have at http://www.alertrank.com/. The dream of universal integration has been around since the dawn of personal computing. In fact, Windows was originally conceived as a competitor for VisiOn, one of the first integrating environments. Where this dream tends to break down is that most users really want to do one thing at a time, and would rather context switch than put everything into one box. Even Windows and the Mac became a way of keeping multiple contexts open at the same time, rather than truly integrating disparate apps. We need to accept that people want a dashboard to do one thing well. Then another dashboard to do another thing. It doesn't make sense to us geeks, but that's what keeps happening.
Your idea is a little bit like pageonce, which kind of does the same thing for personal things like bank accounts and cell phone minutes. I love posts like this, where a vision is described. And it's a very good idea, to boot.
This a great use case for Linked Data/Semantic Web. If the services you use would only provide the data in a standard way (RDF), provide a way to filter it to suit your preferences (SPARQL) and provide a standard method for updating that data (SPARUL/SPARQL Update), you'd be all set! You'd have the data you want, in the format you want and it would be relatively easy to mesh all that data together and create bridges between those islands.
Hopefully these companies will come around to the realization that opening their data up will be of great benefit to their users, their service/brand/position in their market, and the web as a whole.
You've just nailed the problem MindTouch solves. http://cli.gs/revolt
www.gluecon.com is next week. This conference also has a strong emphasis on this topic.
Enjoy!
How nice it must be to have a platform where you can put out a call for exactly the tailored software you need.
Can I post an article about my company to let the SW world know what type of management software I need?
Basically create your own web start-page accessible only by you and anyone you wish to share it with.
Ideally, there would be a standard widget and feed API for all of these services and products. Without that, every single application would have to have some sort of custom wrapper to grab the data and serve it up along-side everything else. It would be a pretty huge undertaking, as everybody has a dozen different things they want on their dashboard. And, it would be an ongoing huge undertaking because none of these things are standing still...they're all coming out with new versions regularly, changing the available data, etc.
I love the idea, though, as I'm in the same boat. I'm pretty much constantly rotating through the admin pages of Drupal, WordPress, Virtualmin, SugarCRM, Google Analytics and AdWords, and probably a half dozen other things that don't immediately come to mind. I've been working on a version of RSS for systems data, which would only cover two of the above use cases comfortably (anything that provides numbers, percentages, ratios, etc., comparative data that can be graphed). But maybe some sort of standard feed format could be created for reporting from any sort of service. I'm not sure how one would standardize across so many different types of information, though, which is why widgets seem the obvious path forward.
You're looking for xIMpp, our XMPP SaaS and desktop client that pulls content in via XMPP message streams (in JEP60 PubSub). http://ximpp.com/
@Bernard Lunn
Try http://www.runmyprocess.com/ for on demand data en business integration.
RunMyProcess is a Web platform specialized in building and running workflows and business process based applications (BPM). Delivered as a Software as a Service.
I'm using an application called Prism from SiSense
that allow me to connect to my ad words data, Amazon S3 and Google spreadsheets easily.
I'm combining all that data with my website mysql db into one dashboard and can control my business effectively.
http://qlikview.com/ is worth a look I think. I don't think it'll work for SaaS-based systems as it seems better suited to "in house" systems where it can go and get data from the databases directly.
In the "old days" middle managers did not spend their time preparing these reports. They managed groups. That's what managers do and have always done. There may have been one accounting manager who was responsible for those reports from his staff, which in these modern days has been reduced in size (and replaced by an even larger group responsible for regulatory compliance), but it's completely inaccurate to characterize the old days as generally inefficient compared to the new ones.
For every efficiency gained by a mashup or web application or other random modern convenience, there is an inefficiency inflicted by bad hardware, bad software, and wastes of time associated with changes in office style. What's the biggest and most powerful department of many corporations? IT. In the "old days" IT didn't exist....
Great write up Bernard on the pain that people are feeling in many areas of their professional and personal lives. This is one of the pains that people are now feeling in the search field as well and people are asking “How can I get everything I want in one dashboard when I search?” i.e. real-time social feeds, historical information and relevancy that is determined by the user and not the engine.
Back to your issue of the web-based and personal apps, I agree I jump from one program to the next. I actually keep one computer running all day to track various metrics and then use another machine to run my day-to-day apps for productivity.
The aggregation issue has always been there I think now it’s getting to a point where there is so much data to find, view and ingest the pain is getting to the point now that an app or program is finally being requested and will be accepted on a broad scale.
I will be looking at the options I have read about in the comments here for my SaaS and tracking tools that I use regularly.
Thanks for hitting this topic that is long overdue.
I'm guessing that it'll be the web browser who take control over this aggregation. In other RWW post these days say, it will be the browsers who start adding user selected information into the browsing experience. Dashboarding will be the central (homepage) piece in this new web browsing.
All the comments and discussion over this topic shows how important this is to people and their time!
You can check out Pageonce http://www.pageonce.com
Does exactly this for many of the accounts mentioned above
Hey we can help. We work in situations like this daily. Its our regular task.
Check us out at www.bizmash.com.
If you need further information please fill out the contact us button.
Best
APIs - or the next generation of that concept - are necessary to bridge the gap. Google Analytics now offers an API and the Google Charts API is a huge time-saver when it comes time to visualize all that aggregated data.
Aggregating 50%, 60%, 90%, etc. of the key metrics and performance indicators is nice, but until we can wrangle 100% of your decision-support information in one view, we will still have to hop from one dashboard to another.
If the dashboard does not have to reflect real-time information, then we can consider the option of batching data exported from the individual systems into a warehouse. Financial information and time-clock data are two examples of information that are not reliable until audited/validated. In cases like this, a daily or weekly export-and-upload process could eliminate the need for a direct coupling of the dashboard to the finance/time clock system.
you can check out my latest article on Dashboards with XQuery here
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/x-xqdashboard/index.html
I'm combining all that data with my website mysql db into one dashboard and can control my business effectively.
Your idea is a little bit like pageonce, which kind of does the same thing for personal things like bank accounts and cell phone minutes. I love posts like this, where a vision is described. And it's a very good idea, to boot.
Your idea is a little bit söve like pageonce, which kind of does the same thing for personal things like bank accounts and cell söve phone minutes. I love posts like this, where a vision is described. And it's a very good idea, to boot.
Marketmesa.com has a dashboard http://www.marketmesa.com that can chart and compare hundreds of business performances - on your dates - in one screen.
Marketmesa consists of two modules: 1. Database - named Stocks, 2. Charts - named Charts.
Since Marketmesa Stocks was originally designed for the Stock Market, native data is accepted from Worden's TC2000 Stock Market programs. Non-native format data can be converted to native format data using an ETL - Extract, Transform and Load module included in the /File/Get External Data function of Microsoft Access or through other 3rd party ETLs found with internet Search. Many of these data formatting programs can be automated for each data source.
Whether it be stock market, business key performance indicators or other entities to be compared, Marketmesa merges data from multiple sources and can automate to import at pre-determined times.
Once the data is imported, hundreds of entities can be compared at the same time in numeric reports and 2D and 3D charts. 3D charts are particularly good at comparing hundreds at the same time.
Charles Rosendorf - Founder, Marketmesa.com
Another great way I've been using this service is integrating Yahoo Pipes in Netvibes. So, for instance, instead of creating a simple feed from say, just Google Blog Search, I create a pipe that integrates search results from Google + Twingly + Technorati + Icerocket blog searches. See the exponential increase in value?
corporates will admin tanky you is web site.