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image The business intelligence industry is changing rapidly. It seems that there are new services emerging every quarter and the diversity and implementation strategies are broad and varied. When it comes to creating dashboards for iPad, there are many choices, however, it’s not just about the eye-candy for the boss or the simplicity with which services can be launched. These are key elements in any dashboard solution, but they are not the only ones.

There appears to be a pattern in BI that is taking shape. No longer is it necessary to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and months or years of development to create useful KPI (key performance indicator) dashboards that help managers become more aware of operational data. It can be done in weeks and for a small fraction of the cost of traditional BI projects. With the right tools and good business requirements, skilled integration experts can hammer out a relatively complete solution in days. The time-compression factor is a significant trend.

Another pattern that I’ve observed is the use of social data more often than not. Businesses are now more cognizant of the influence and impact that social media and networking have on operations, brand equity, and customer satisfaction. Integrating social media metrics and performance indicators into dashboards has become a very big hot button for BI buyers.

Dashboard vs Business Intelligence Solution

It serves us well to define these terms at some level. In my view, dashboards are typically reflections of data that has been pre-harvested, mined, filtered, and organized for display. As such, this represents just the last mile of a BI solution. This is also known as a data visualization tool.

On the other hand, a comprehensive BI solution typically factors in how to acquire the data for the dashboard, how it is filtered, sorted, and protected at a security level. In some cases, a BI product may include all facets of the solution – from data mining to data visualization. Klipfolio Dashboard is just such a solution. It helps you craft 100% of the BI solution in most cases. There are some cases where it may need to rely on other key database and integration tools depending on your IT climate, but for the most part it represents an end-to-end solution.

Klipfolio Dashboard is precisely this – a comprehensive business intelligence solution that is cloud-based and fully web oriented, built on open web standards.

The last part of this description is key – “open web standards” makes it possible to run its dashboards on mobile devices and not surprising, Mobile Safari works really well with Klipfolio Dashboard.

In a recent interview with the Klipfolio Dashboard folks CTO James Scott, and architect Mark Priatel, I learned some interesting things about the philosophy and architecture behind Klipfolio.

At the outset, this technology is still emerging. If you’ve been fortunate enough to get a beta invite, what you see is truly amazing. It’s easy to create really useful and compelling dashboard components effortlessly. If you have a strong inclination toward assembling data and setting attributes for dashboard widgets, you can become a very proficient dashboard builder in a relatively short period of time.

The best part about Klipfolio – no coding required.

James is quick to point out that while the current beta is targeted at more technical dashboard builders, there are lots of online help resources and “klip” examples. Note – a “klip” is their brand term for a widget – a component of data in a dashboard collection of other components. Additionally there are plenty of pre-fabricated data sources to use and learn from.

imageSeparating Visualization Components from Data Sources

The separation of data and design is not a new idea; it has been a fundamental principle since the advent of CSS many decades ago. Architecturally, Klipfolio does this exceptionally well. Data sources are defined in a completely separate process from the klips that use data sources.

The example data source shown at right is source that simply fetches a cell from a Google spreadsheet. It took me three minutes to set up and it will always have return the value of that cell.

Security

In the latest beta released late yesterday, data sources also support oAuth and Basic HTTP Authentication. This is absolutely crucial when building complex dashboards with extremely sensitive data. oAuth streamlines the access control issue and avoids the practice of creating proxy data ambiguity. With just a few clicks, tokens can be created to integrate Klipfolio data sources with services such as Twitter and Google Docs (many more services will be added in the future).

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Klips (Widgets)

Rendering the data from the source component is done with a klip; a dashboard widget in common vernacular. The klip contains attributes that link it to the data source and extract the information necessary for display in the klip. Formatting attributes including other important ranges such as threshold value, are provided. Different attributes are necessary depending on the type of klip you are defining, but these are mostly ready to plug and play.

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As a tech-head myself and a strong desire to recommend tools and services that leverage open standards, I always like to find little techie nuggets in a new product; it’s an indicator that the designers and developers understand how important it is for tools to be more transparent about the underpinnings of their technology. Klipfolio nails it across many levels.

And the attention to design detail is very good. Note how the dialog displays a real-time rendering of the widget you are working on. This is WYSIWYG at its finest – a highly productive development environment to say the least.

For example, note the Source button in the Edit Klip dialog display shown above. This option will give you the “klip” source code the platform generated for this widget. This opens up advantages of editing, debugging, and a generally deeper understanding of the tool andimage how it works. It also opens up the possibility (it’s a beta so don’t get too exited) that you can easily copy and paste components, or even use other tools to generate code for Klipfolio.

The data properties also provide powerful manipulation capabilities that allow you to use functions and other direct transformations to use information with great precision. Again, these are features for technically inclined people who understand how to manipulate information at an abstract level.

With power comes responsibility…

Being able to access all these wonderful internal features is akin to using a chainsaw; it’ll cut logs fast, but if you grab it by the wrong end, you can easily cut yourself. Backup your work frequently. Practice safe processes and you’ll be fine as you learn.

Depth

As I played more with the technical aspects of the platform, I tried creating data sources from HTML pages, XML feeds, XML documents, and even Word documents. For the most part I was able to create data sources without a hitch. Complex integration tasks require a little more thought, but not much more effort – a sign of a truly solid architecture.

A Bright Spot in BI

Klipfolio Dashboard is emerging as a key player in the BI segment. When I first saw it I assumed that this was likely to be a great product for small business, but the more I experiment, the more I realize my first impressions were way off the mark. Perhaps my historical recollections of the Windows Klipfolio desktop widgets influenced my initial thinking, but this is an entirely different architecture and solution.

Certainly this is an ideal product for small or large organizations that are trying to increase the use of KPIs in whatever element of their business and professional areas can benefit.