UFO Tracker Dashboard and More!
Here’s a fun UFO Tracker Dashboard from the zany folks at Reportalooza.com, designed by Josh Tapley using SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (Xcelsius) technology. It’s just one of several on the site that are part of the “Guest Challenge”, including cigar analytics and an overview of UK football – be sure to check them all out and vote for the winner!
Sailing Analytics for the SAP 5O5 World Championship
In business, we often talk about the difference between efficiency (“doing it right”) and effectiveness (“doing the right thing”). And in today’s fast-changing markets, there’s often a tradeoff involved, where if you optimize any particular measure in the short term you may suffer in the longer term (e.g. if you optimize profitability by not investing in new products). In sailing, as in business, there are many measures to take into account,... [Read More...]
An Introduction to the SAP 5O5 World Sailing Championships 2010
There seems to be a connection between enterprise software billionaires and sail racing. Larry prefers the bigger boats, while Hasso prefers getting wet: For Plattner, sailing two man dinghies and jumping off his 505 into chest-high water to prevent it from getting racked on the beach at Crissy Field is a far cry from having a professional crew guide a Farr 40 or his MaxZ yacht into a slip at Porto Cervo or another yachting Mecca. ‘The 505... [Read More...]
Xcelsius Dashboards on Your Android Mobile Phone
The latest release of Android, v2.2 (“Froyo”) supports the Adobe flash technology used by Xcelsius (now called Dashboard Design) and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer. So now you can access your dashboards, reports, and exploration spaces directly from your mobile device without requiring a separate application (e.g. as you do for the iPhone and iPad). It also means you can reuse all the effort you’ve put into developing Xcelsius dashboards and... [Read More...]
Season’s Greetings with Xcelsius!
Here is a season’s greetings dashboard that shows off some of the latest features of Xcelsius 2008 SP3. Tweet the color you’d like to see in the garland. The dashboard updates every 30 seconds. How long Twitter search takes to recognize the tweet can be pretty variable – but most of the time, it’s less than a minute. How it works: I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”. The... [Read More...]
What’s New in SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius 2008 SP3?
Here’s a summary of some of the new things in the latest version of Xcelsius 2008. I’ve borrowed liberally from the official documentation that you can download, along with the program, here. New Components Sparkline chart components. The new Sparkline chart is based on the Sparkline chart created by Edward Tufte and provides a method for displaying a one-dimensional range of numeric data in a way that is dense, takes up a small space, and can... [Read More...]
BI for Baby: Dashboards to Track Your Child’s KPIs (And The Rest of Us)
Prepare your child for the new world of business from its very earliest hours! Trixie Telemetry has released Trixie Tracker, which includes everything an analytic-obsessed parent needs to track baby’s key performance indicators, including: Sleep Tracking Bowel movements Feeding schedule Medicines And many, many more – including support for mobile: How much longer before this application is available for grownups, too? Well, it’s probably... [Read More...]
How to Create and Deploy Effective Metrics
I’m trying to catch up on a big backlog of materials and documents and documents that I’ve found useful… Here’s an excellent best practices report from TDWI on “how to create and deploy effective metrics” (registration required). The introduction to the document explains the background: Performance metrics are a powerful tool of organizational change. The adage “What gets measured, gets done,” is true. Companies that define objectives,... [Read More...]
Grand Prix Business Intelligence
Last week I had the opportunity to attend VRAAAAAAAAAAAOOOMMMM a corporate event at the Belgian VRAAAAAAAAAAOOOOMMMMM Grand Prix, and present an SAP BusinessObjects product overview and roadmap. Unfortunately, the pleasure of having the opportunity to visit the famous Spa circuit, meeting Heikki Kovalainen, and seeing Lewis Hamilton at dinner was a little VRAAAAAAAOOOOOMMMMM drowned out by the constant, annoying VRAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOMMMM sound of race-cars... [Read More...]
SAP’s Sustainability Dashboards
The SAP’s Sustainability Report web site provides a great example of how business intelligence can help with sustainability reporting and analysis. All public organizations will have to start providing this time of information in the future, and SAP BusinessObjects provides some great tools to do it with. Here are some of the Xcelsius dashboards that are provided as part of the report: Environment Carbon Footprint
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