ColdLight

Shadan Malik wrote a nice piece in DM Review called, “Dashboards: The New Face of Reporting”. He talks at length about the “at-a-glance” ability of a dashboard to present information quickly to today’s business decision makers. Dashboards really are great. But, still, unless you can actively interact with them – pull levers and change assumptions in real time, they are still “reports”. Reports look at what happened in the past – even the recent past.

We will get more insight when we reach into our data and spot the patterns and conditions that have direct meaning on the health of our enterprise. When the dashboard tracks the ebb and flow of data (like vital signs) then we move from the “report” into the “condition-spotting” world of real time. Metaphorically speaking, I want to know that I am heading for rain. I already know if it has rained.

When we empower that dashboard with artificial intelligence driven tools (like Neuron) we begin to get interactivity between the enterprise and the decision maker we will someday be able to steer the enterprise around obstacles. After all, that dashboard metaphor comes from cars, and neither cars nor companies stay still.

A recent article by Kate Maddox from Marketing Metrix cites IDC to that say lead generation is the top marketing priority for tech marketers this year - everyone is looking for the best customers when the economy dips. “With aversion to risk by C-level executives, the slight down turn and concern for growth in the next year, …. more companies are shifting to lead generation programs.” That means buying lists and hoping to get a 2.5% return. Whatever it is that makes the 2.5% respond is a key to finding more responders. The “key” is complex and may take into account many invisible attributes like “time of day” and “weather conditions”. Companies need cost effective ways to find more of these great responders in their lead generation efforts. Deep internal data combined and connected to external data is part of that answer. We want business analytics that identify the visible and invisible attributes of the “better customer” to be repeatable.