January 2010 – New Dashboard Products for 2010

What does 2010 have in store for the BI and dashboarding industry - what can we hope to see in terms of new product offerings?  What trends are we seeing? 

We examined these issues in January of 2010.  Also, no dashboard theme would be complete without articles on "dashboarding how tos," getting started with your dashboard product, as well as a trip back to "dashboard 101."

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February 2010 – Trends in BI and Data Visualization

This wide-ranging topic will surely deliver a variety of opinions and perspectives.

The new year is already showing ongoing advancements in SaaS, rich internet and mobile applications, new developments in animation, analytics for end users, progress in data integration and convergence - where is all this going?  And how can we keep the growing costs and complexities under control?

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March 2010 – BI and Rich Internet Applications

RIAs commonly include Flash, Silverlight, Java, AJAX and more.  With the latest generation of digital dashboards currently being deployed utilizing RIAs, dashboard users have certainly noticed many visual and technological benefits (more interaction, greater accessibility across platforms, video capabilities, the list goes on).

How are those in the BI space using RIAs like Flash and Silverlight to visually represent their business data?  And what are the latest developments in the pipe for the next few quarters? 

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April 2010 – Environmentally Friendly BI

Our April editorial emphasis is a revisiting of "Green BI," which we first featured 14 months ago.  And what a feature it was!  The topic gave Dashboard Insight its busiest month ever.

As we initially reported, green business - which includes a wide range of sustainability and environmentally friendly BI practices - has seen powerful growth in recent years (from both the private and public sectors).   

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May 2010 – BI and OLAP

To those acquainted with the specialized technology related to business analysis and databases, OLAP is a useful organizational structure of data.  But to those who wouldn't know OLAP from a naughty Irish dance, this article will give you the raw basics of a potentially complicated subject.

First off, OLAP stands for "online analytical processing."  Some consider it a set of protocols, while others may call it a technique or approach, but basically it's a flexible way for you to make complicated analyses of multidimensional data - and it provides this information with rapid execution. 

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June 2010 –Mobile BI (revisited)

Has the recent launch of the iPad changed the landscape for mobile technologies?  Last year, we looked at a variety of handheld devices - powerful little gadgets that may have started as phones but have now evolved into fully functional web browsers and more.  Users were doing productive things like accessing real-time sales figures, drilling down into the numbers and actively analyzing data.

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July 2010 –Social Media and BI

As you probably know, SM includes blogs, forums, podcast, social networking sites and so much more - any technology where people interact online.  Does business intelligence even have a place in this world?  Apparently, it does and in a big way - because SM is now used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide and it's still growing.  Some studies put it as the number one activity on the web!

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August 2010 –Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and BI

As we stated last year, when thinking about SaaS, a few questions immediately come to mind: How does this delivery model compare to traditional software deployment?  What are the concerns of your I.T. department?  What are the security issues - and are there security advantages/disadvantages in dealing with large or small companies?  What are the variables in pricing and contracts?  And finally, is SaaS some kind of fad or is it really the future of software delivery?

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September 2010 –Open Source and BI

It's clear to many in the industry that an open-source approach to business software offers some compelling benefits for end users.  But what about vendors, how do they generate revenue when they give away their source code for free?  How do open-source solutions compare with commercial applications?  And are the world's largest software companies finally taking an interest in open-source BI?  Is open-source BI becoming more of a mainstream offering?

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October 2009 –B.I. and Excel

After more than two decades of heavy use, Microsoft Excel still seems to be the most popular tool for business intelligence applications. From simple "Ma and Pa"-type data analysis to third-party applications extending its vast functionality, Excel seems to have something for everyone in the BI community.

And why not? It's everywhere and everyone knows how to use it. But what does the future hold for the spreadsheet sovereign?

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November 2009 –Leveraging Unstructured Data

Search" seems to be the most commonly used application in terms of leveraging unstructured data within BI these days, but then there are also ways of structuring unstructured data within data warehouses - plus there's the issue of how all this fits into analytics.  And some hot topics currently surrounding unstructured data include social networking analysis (web analytics) and sentiment analysis.

With blogs, email, SMS, etc., how much of this "noisy text" is actually useful?  What is being done to expand BI capabilities in this area?  Where's it all going? 

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December 2009 – Dashboards and B.I. in the Retail World

December is by far the year's biggest month for retail revenue, starting with a rush to the mall after late November's U.S. Thanksgiving and numerous trips continuing during the next few weeks.  With so much stuff piling on and flying off the shelves, retailers need to understand their data more than ever during this critical period.  Now is the time to analyze aisle occupancy, display conversion rates, store traffic, sales per employee and much more.

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