Lots of data, but no information?

Dashboards provide new sources of ROI...

Downturns magnify IT spend many times more than the norm, creating at the very least, caution when deliberating further outlay but also thrusting existing implementations into the spot light to prove their return on investment.

Let’s consider the CIO who only five years ago purchased an enterprise-wide or departmental system. Today, the economic landscape has changed beyond recognition, the business is under pressures which it has not experienced before, and there is an overwhelming necessity to produce better and real-time information upon which to make decisions. In short; there is a need to do more with less and to make existing investments work harder.

Anthony Dent, Managing Director of UK dashboard software vendor Dynistics explains: “We’re seeing massive demand for our Active Dashboards software to address two things; the need for instant interpretation of data in a highly usable format for making rapid decisions and the need to make existing enterprise software ever more relevant, extending its life and protecting long term investments during leaner times.

“Customers often have all the data they could want sat in silos across the organisation – everything from a spreadsheet to a full relational database, but still don’t have the management information they want at their fingertips. Active Dashboards addresses that issue for them.”

The payback is two fold; the user spends considerably less time asking internal departments to run reports, number crunching data, and putting together management packs containing presentations which are instantly out of date. The CIO on the other hand, for little outlay, safeguards the long term investment of legacy systems whilst unlocking the information from within them and making them usable and relevant to doing business in today’s environment.

Warren Jenchner, Managing Director of Apex Lifts Ltd uses Active Dashboards as a complementary enhacement to the company’s Pegasus accounting software. Pegasus resells Dynistic’s Active Dashboards under its own brand name enabling existing customers to distribute meaningful financial management information across the organisation.

Warren explains: “The addition of dashboards has provided Apex Lifts with a tremendous boost to the usability of our chosen accounting package, especially for non accounting trained employees. For me it provides a comprehensive and customisable management briefing when I arrive at my desk each morning. Key issues, such as sales, cash flow and debtors are updated in real time.”

Usability is key; if software is intuitive to use, employees across the organisation can have instant access to information that might previously have only been the domain of management. Communicating corporate objectives and measures in a format that provides real-time feedback on results and progress towards the achievement of corporate goals helps to foster a proactive management culture and promote employee productivity.

And what of the inhouse IT department? Well, Active Dashboards makes life easier for them too as they can more easily provide the organisation with the information it needs but spend less time creating and distributing reports. It’s also no longer necessary to aggregate data into a single data warehouse; as Active Dashboards can retrieve it directly from one or more sources simultaneously, making implementation very simple and very rapid– delivering significant results in a matter of days.

“Active Dashboards is at the forefront of innovation in Business Intelligence solutions,” says Anthony Dent.