Many of us are familiar with the dashboards available at portals such as Yahoo! and Google; we can get services and information such as news, weather, stock quotes, email, entertainment and travel tickets, maps and directions all from one screen.
Dashboards caught on for enterprise use, and in recent years many independent software vendors (ISVs) began offering dashboards to display information from several functions in a single view. For example, in salesforce.com, users can create a personalized dashboard to view information such as contact management, orders placed, projected orders and revenue for each customer.
One of the limitations of ISV dashboards was that they were able to display information only from a single application, not from several applications or data sources. This meant, for example, that a VP of sales would need to log in to several applications or dashboards to get complete customer information such as order and shipping history, contact management, revenue projections, accounts receivable, product support history, contract information, revenue and purchasing comparisons with other customers.
While IT professionals could develop customized dashboards that could pull and display data from various sources, this requires significant time, human and financial resources, and scheduling consideration in the context of competing and shifting priorities.
It is now easy to create personalized dashboards from any web-facing application or data source. The availability of web services and web-based applications have ushered in a “grown up” version of enterprise dashboards that would enable the VP of sales mentioned above to view all desired customer information on one screen. Below is a screen shot of a personalized dashboard mashing data from disparate sources such as salesforce.com, Google, Twitter, and an enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) application such as SAP.
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| An enterprise mashup dashboard displaying data from disparate sources |
A personalized dashboard displaying other information from other applications for another user, such as a call-center representative, could be created in minutes using mashup and visualization software such asmashmatrix. mashmatrix provides a drag-and-drop environment for rapidly creating dashboards that “mash up” data from disparate sources in a single view. Mashups are applications such as dashboards that access and allow users to interact with several applications and data sources to complete their work.
The ability to rapidly mash up and display in a single dashboard the information that professionals need to efficiently perform their work is one example of how mashups have “grown up” from consumer portals to enterprise use.
What other enterprise mashup software have you used or learned about and what enterprise dashboards have you seen or used?
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