Editor's Blog on Data Visualization, Dashboard Design, Performance Indicators, and Business Intelligence News

My name is Alexander Chiang, Research Director at Dashboard Insight, and I'm the guy who runs this site. I've served as a business intelligence consultant building a lot of dashboards learning a variety of BI methodologies and tools along the way. I look forward to sharing my thoughts with you on the topics of data visualization, dashboard design, performance indicators / measures, and business intellience news.

Feb. 06, 2012

In this product review I aim to provide the reader with a detailed look at using InetSoft's Style Scope to develop and design dashboards. In demonstrating how to use the product from data to dashboard I will cover the following topics: Style Scope overview, workflow, technology overview, dashboard development, and recommendations

Jan. 26, 2012

I’m currently at the MicroStrategy World Conference in Miami. I’m impressed with Miami’s weather (a staggering 25 Celsius average over the last 3 days) and MicroStrategy's offering called Wisdom.

Wisdom is a free application that blew me away. It visualizes data that many marketers would kill for including age, gender, and location. The visualizations could use much improvement, but the data represented was quite interesting.

Jan. 06, 2012

A friend of mine forwarded me this data visualization on how whiskies compare to each other. As a Scotch whisky lover, I found the data visualization informative and clean. However, I would have liked the image to be bigger so the labels were easier to map to the points.

Dec. 30, 2011

We are nearing a new year and the business intelligence market is abuzz with discussions of the major trends for 2012. The three that vendors and analysts have been hyping up include Cloud, Mobile, and Big Data. There are some, including myself, that expect collaborative BI to make a surge in 2012, as well. However, I don’t expect too much adoption by corporations in 2012 because collaborative BI requires a certain corporate culture.

Dec. 20, 2011
Choosing the Best Visual Analysis Interface of 2011 was difficult. Each submission offered good functionality, but Patrick Tehubijuluw of Credis did a great job putting together a visual analysis interface that was extremely easy to use. Why was it so easy to use? Because the instructions were built in! He built his entry using QlikView because he has a lot of experience with it and feels it provides a solid set of functionality. Although Patrick used QlikView to build the winning entry, he won because of his data visualization and user interface design skills.
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Feb. 14, 2012

In the spirit of Valentine's Day, I wanted to share these charming visualizations with you.

Feb. 07, 2012

I was planning to write yet another article on key performance indicators because I felt Dashboard Insight needed an up-to-date reference for those who did not practice in performance management. I initially started writing the article, thinking I didn't need any reference material. I've lived through understanding, discovering, and refining measures for the last six years and I felt I could write it solely on experience.

Jan. 29, 2012

Research organizations such as Gartner, Forrestor, and TDWI report that self-service business intelligence is a critical requirement for a BI project. As Research Director at Dashboard Insight, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to many different types of users. The skills, knowledge, and business needs range so much that it made me question the pursuit of self-service BI.

Jan. 25, 2012

I recently moderated a BI discussion group here in Toronto. The topics centered around Big Data, Mobile BI, Cloud BI, and Self-Service BI. One individual made an excellent point about a very real risk with Big Data. In fact, this point is valid with any volume of data.

Jan. 13, 2012

I’ve always played the part of the dashboard designer and rarely engaged at the infancy of a business intelligence (BI) project. However, it's inevitable for me to advise on refining, removing, and adding measures presented in the dashboards. After all, the right measures have to be on the dashboards to make them effective. These types of changes are typically an uphill battle when I jump in this late into a BI project which leads to frustration for myself and the client.