Achieving Maximum Value from Dashboards

Dashboards such as Power BI, Sisense, Tableau and numerous others can provide incredible real-time insights for executives to manage and optimize results, whether that be production efficiencies, best in class client/customer service, compliance with government regulations, or myriad of other key goals. Generally accepted key requirements to a successful dashboard implementation (not listed in any order of priority) include:

• Selection of the appropriate data visualization tool
• Identification of the key user group(s)
• Clearly defining the key performance indicators (KPI’s) or metrics
• Establishing the best charts, graphs, and other visuals for each user group
• Access to quality data

Conventional wisdom dictates that this final point requires data preparation to obtain usable and reliable data. Most often, this data is located in multiple data sources that cannot communicate with each other, and yet, analyzing it effectively requires a holistic view of all the data. The conventional approach necessitates the use of an extract, transform and load (ETL) tool to copy data from these multiple disparate data sources and cleanse, transform, standardize, and secure it in a destination or database (think data warehouse or data lake) so that the data can be rendered useable. Making data useable also includes addressing data security and governance, and master data management of some form to deduplicate and obtain the latest and best data.

In many cases, companies are facing the growing challenges of:

• Large numbers of diverse data sources that cannot easily be ETL’d into a data lake (DL) or data warehouse (DW), e.g., unstructured and IoT device data
• Increasingly diverse and multiple locations for data: On-premise, multiple Clouds, data centers, SaaS, government and IoT devices
• Multiple data sources may not belong to, and are not managed by, organizations, e.g., network providers in healthcare and SaaS/Salesforce
• Up to 80% of valuable and short supply data scientists’ and data analysts’ time is spent cleaning and preparing data instead of high-value analysis

Companies are realizing that they cannot physically copy/ETL ALL data to a centralized location, e.g., DL or DW, and so they make the decision to limit the quantity or sacrifice the quality of the data feeding their dashboards.

The answer lies in WhamTech SmartData Fabric® security-centric distributed virtual data, master data and graph data management, and analytics solutions, which provide an improved and more seamless way to work with data, by leaving it in sources and changing the way fundamental and advanced data management is addressed. This solution provides access to data across multiple disparate data sources to feed usable data to the dashboard tools. In addition, SmartData Fabric® supports views that pre-aggregate, pre-calculate and pre-join data to significantly accelerate dashboard performance. SmartData Fabric® can also automatically refresh dashboards through KPI monitoring and event processing,  thus eliminating the need to constantly poll and therefore impose query load on data sources for any significant changes.

As an example, one of the largest IT integration companies in the US sees WhamTech SmartData Fabric® as replacing their DW with a virtual enterprise DW (EDW), and thereby feeding their high-end dashboard tools with timely, clean and usable data.

About WhamTech
WhamTech, Inc. is a software company whose mission is to develop security-centric distributed virtual data, master data and graph data management, and analytics technology software products. WhamTech develops these products to anticipate, meet and exceed the demands of customers seeking an alternative to the conventional approaches of data warehouses, federated data access with conventional adapters and Enterprise Search. WhamTech’s goal is to provide an improved and more seamless way to work with data, by leaving it in sources and changing the way fundamental and advanced data management is addressed. For more information, visit WhamTech at www.whamtech.com or follow @WhamTech_Inc on Twitter.

By: Larry King, CPA, CGMA WhamTech CFO/COO/CCO

Contact
Larry King, 972-991-5700 ext. 703
larry.king@whamtech.com