Welcome from Visual Mining Vice President of Engineering and Client Services, Kevin Scott
Welcome to ChartLine for October 2008. As we approach the holiday season mindful of the challenges that face our businesses, it is increasingly important to develop and implement strategies that drive competitive advantage and deliver real, tangible ROI. At Visual Mining, we’re proud to see our NetCharts customers realize both. Our solutions make a demonstrable difference in the efficiency of your day to day operations by adding transparency and clarity to data through the use of analytics and interactive visual presentations. Our comprehensive development tools enable you to quickly build dynamic, interactive advanced data visualizations that integrate with your applications and data sources.
We enjoy hearing from you; in fact your feedback is one of the major forces driving our product development, which I have proudly led for over ten years. We thank you, our customers, for making us successful, and we look forward to delivering on our continued commitment of ensuring your success with innovative charting, visualization and dashboarding technologies.
Thank you,
Kevin Scott, VP of Engineering and Client Services
Visual Mining to exhibit at TDWI World Conference,
New Orleans, November 4th and 5th
Planning on attending the upcoming TDWI World Conference in New Orleans? Stop by booth #115, adjacent to the food and beverage area, and get a sneak peak of our newest charts and features available in NetCharts Pro version 6.0. Learn from our experts about enabling agile dashboards that improve the experience for IT as well as the business user, and how Visual Mining can positively impact your bottom line in a down market.
Are you chart-savvy? Take a spin on our game wheel and see if you can “Name That Chart”. We’ll have prizes and giveaways, plus you can take our survey for a chance to win an iPod.
Chart of the Month – Pareto Chart
The pareto chart is a powerful tool for decision makers at all levels that need to understand the key things that affect their business in a simple, easy to understand visualization.
It is unique in that it lists data in descending value order along the x axis. The pareto also has the unique feature of a line over the bar data that represents the cumulative value of the bars as they progress along the x axis, naturally from 0% to 100%.
One reason the pareto chart is so useful for anyone that needs to quickly analyze data and make an educated decision is what it represents. It highlights the most important set of factors, represented by the steepness of the cumulative value line, allowing you to effectively understand where efforts should be focused to achieve the greatest improvement or which sets of measurable have the greatest impact on your business.
The pareto is also one of the seven tools of quality control, and is born from the 80/20 rule: What 20% of sources are causing 80% of the issues. Click here for more pareto chart examples.
Enabling Charts to Show Up in Google Search
NetCharts Pro and NetCharts Server both provide a feature that allows users to associate keywords with chart images that will be indexed by search engines. This allows your chart-enabled web pages to be more easily and accurately found by users doing web searches.
Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team has a nice youtube video on the subject of creating searchable images, at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-attributes-smartly.html.
NetCharts Pro and NetCharts Server can create HTML IMG src tags with user-specified ALT attributes. IMG ALT attributes that are indexed by search engines and will allow your charts to contribute to the index for a web page.
By default, NetCharts products will create an image tag for the above image that looks something like this:<img src="getimage?image=1248268726" usemap="#1248268726">
However, NetCharts can produce an image tag with an additional ALT attribute that could look something like this:
<img src="getimage?image=1248268726" usemap="#1248268726" alt=’Lead Count Trend 2007 2008’>
A search engine such as Google that indexed this page would process the ALT text allowing a search on the term Lead or Trend to include this page as a result.
In NetCharts Pro, the ability to add ALT text to images is controlled by the API defined in:
netcharts.pro.util.NFServerGeneratedImage and netcharts.pro.util.NFServletUtil classes.
In NetCharts Server, this is controlled by the API defined in:
netcharts.server.util.PageCreator
The Next Step – Dashboard Agility – Begin with the End in Mind
by Michael Brooks
Recently we have seen fluctuations in the global economy that have challenged even the most successful and well-managed companies. Decision-makers at all levels need advanced data visualization solutions that enable them to quickly assess market conditions and identify opportunities for driving further efficiencies and gaining an edge over competitors. By combining advanced data visualization technology with innovations in agile performance dashboard development there is a unique opportunity to improve collaboration between IT and business users in a way that increases personal productivity and overall business performance.
Anyone who has worked through the process of defining and achieving consensus on metrics architecture understands the challenge of helping constituents envision how those metrics would be developed and reported. As Stephen Covey implied, the concept of “Begin with the End in Mind” has terrific benefits in any performance dashboard deployment. As a result, rapid dashboard prototyping becomes an extremely attractive option that saves IT expense, reduces risk and accelerates benefits to end users.
Advanced data visualization increases the effectiveness of the human-computer interface to repackage enormous amounts of data into a consolidated view of the metrics that matter, provides a mechanism for collaboration between business users, and keeps the business moving forward based on a single point of reference. Performance dashboards act as searchlights that enable business users to scan, analyze and act upon critical business issues that may not be in their immediate field of view. Historically, tools have required lengthy discussions between end users and programmers that require weeks, and in some cases months, to agree on content, design, deployment and the inevitable revisions. This traditional paradigm had significant implications in terms of delays, resources, cost and other impacts that often create an adversarial relationship between IT and the user community.
Fortunately, recent advances in agile performance dashboard development represent an innovative opportunity to create a more effective balance that increases the speed and effectiveness of dashboard deployment while lowering development cost. IT professionals continue to maintain control over data governance and integration with data tables that are frequently disguised by ambiguous names. Business users apply their unique domain experience to define key performance indicators, design business dashboards that address their specific areas of concern, and integrate this capability into their management processes. As this transformation occurs, IT gains greater efficiencies, users gain more flexibility at a lower cost, and there is increased buy-in by all parties involved. Finally, IT and other departments such as finance have a golden opportunity to transform their organizations by contributing specific knowledge of the strategic needs of the enterprise, financial and non-financial metrics development, and risk management to facilitate collaboration across business units.
The end result is a more responsive knowledge-driven enterprise that delivers the comprehensive, insightful metrics decision-makers need to be more effective in their roles. In the next issue of this column, we will explore how to measure the success of a dashboard deployment and determine whether agile performance dashboards are the best fit for you organization.
Visual Mining's
News & Tips Letter
OCTOBER 29, 2008
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Visual Mining, Inc.
15825 Shady Grove Rd, #20
Rockville, MD 20850
301.795.2200
www.visualmining.com
info@visualmining.com
Visual Mining provides visualization solutions that instantly transform data into actionable business information. Visual Mining’s NetCharts products deliver comprehensive solutions for both developers and end users that are intuitive and effective. Visual Mining’s support and professional services teams compliment its products by providing the expertise to ensure success. Visual Mining: Visualize. Analyze. Capitalize.
NetCharts and Visual Mining are registered trademarks of Visual Mining, Inc. All other product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.
ChartLine © 2008 Visual Mining, Inc. All rights reserved.