You’ve executed some detailed analysis and created someawesome visualizations in Bime which you have saved to a dashboard. However despite the great visualizations the dashboard doesn’t look quite right. Here are 11 quick and easy tips to get your dashboard looking up to scratch, appealing and easy to use for the end-user.

Put your visualizations in a logical order

The visualizations which show the key metrics should be at the top and to the left of the dashboard as this is where research shows the user will direct most of their attention (as shown). Make sure that related visualizations, or visualizations where a comparison can be made are placed next to each other. The dashboard should be arranged to make the end user consume the dashboard in the order the dashboard creator intended it to be consumed. In Bime changing the layout of visualizations on your dashboard could not be easier, once in the edit mode simply drag-and-drop.



 

A line chart is a classic method for visualizing continuous change from one value to the next (often change over time) and just one of the many visualizations available in Bime.

When to use a line chart:

When NOT to use a line chart:

It can often be a challenge, however, to display a lot of trends on one line chart clearly and succinctly.

On September 30th Gartner released a report on the current landscape of BI vendors. Gartner analysts James Richardson and Neil Chandler were assigned to position the main actors offering Interactive Visualization Solutions for Data Analysis and Creation of Dashboards. Bime is recognized among the main actors in the world.

Gartner recently announced its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012, at the Gartner Symposium currently being held in Orlando. Included in the list were in-memory computing, big data and cloud computing. The list reveals a mix of both technologies which are already making a lot of disruption in 2011, such as cloud computing and some lesser talked about technologies such as in-memory computing.

Cloud Computing – Perhaps the most talked about technology of the moment, Gartner predict that the cloud has the potential to make a “long term and broad” impact. Despite the amount of hype currently surrounding the technology, it is still in its infancy, with Gartner predicting the market will continue to develop in 2012 as enterprises move from trying to understand the cloud, to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds.

Big Data – Again, another term which has become widely used in 2011. Gartner notes that the size, complexity and speed of delivery of data has now exceeded the amount traditional data centres can deal with. Thus, this new data requires the development of new “exotic” technologies just to manage the volume of data alone and Gartner believes a range of new technologies to deal with the ‘big data’ problem will cause disruption in 2012.

The term 'Big Data' has become almost ubiquitous in discussions surrounding the future of data visualization and  business intelligence. Although it is used in a range of different situations, the expression has become an umbrella term to explain the steep increase in the amount, and the variety of data now produced. Whilst many recent statistics simply cover the amount of data produced, The University Of Texas recently conducted a study sponsored by Sybase to examine the the possible benefit to companies if this data could be utilized.

The study is based on 150 Fortune 1000 companies and thus the results are very vague. That said, the study comes up with some interesting findings. With a 10% increase in the userbility of it's data, the average Fortune 1000 company from the sample could increase their return-on-equity by 16%. Some of the other key finds are neatly summarized in the stylish infographic we found on ReadWriteWeb below.

The study further highlights the need for companies to turn their data into dollars. Bime lets the small guys unlock the value of big data!

We constantly hear about how much data we are creating every day – check out this interesting little infographic by which puts some of those numbers in perspective.

This ‘data explosion‘ is one of the reasons companies need tools like Bime – new innovations have enabled more and more data to be managed and supported, and this data needs to be analyzed in order to produce value for an organization.

Start analyzing now.

How would you like to display all your Google Adwords KPIs in a single, beautiful dashboard? Well it’s possible! Monitor measures such as clicks, conversions, impressions and average positions, and mix these with your ad expenditure data to get a fundamental overview of the performance of your Adwords campaigns.

To give you an idea of what you could achieve in a few minutes with Bime, we built a basic dashboard containing (dummy) Adwords campaign metrics data. Imagine the possibilities if you spent a couple of hours on it!

You can access the dashboard by clicking the screenshot below.

CIO Insight recently published a slideshow about application adoption trends over the next year. According to a recent survey from SnapLogic, of which over 110 CIOs and other top execs took part, CIOs and other senior tech executives continue to pursue BI, analytics, productivity/collaboration, financial, sales and social media tools, as they strive to integrate IT with their organization’s strategic objectives.

This is yet further proof that the BI/analytics space is hot right now, and more and more companies are realizing that business performance can be largely improved by leveraging these tools.

“BI, for certain, remains hot. But so are other apps, such as those that are Saas/cloud-driven.”

Bime really can be used to analyze any type of data… This week, it’s football stats! Created by one of our customer reps, check out this cool dashboard detailing where all the money was spent (or to some fans’ dismay, wasn’t spent) in the English Premier League and French Ligue 1 during this recently closed summer transfer window.

The graphics below are only images, if you open the dashboard in the web player in your browser these visualizations are interactive and using the row selector tool, more information can often be examined. To access the interactive dashboard click here. The only measure shown from the original data-set was the fee amount. The remaining averages, calculations and queries have been executed within Bime. In Bime you can easily distinguish between the attributes by assigning a color, thus, throughout our dashboard red=English Premier League and blue=French Ligue 1. Throughout the dashboard, ‘N’ refers to the number of transfers. Thanks to the concise way we were able to display the data, and by querying the wider dataset, a number of conclusions can be drawn.