Dashboards are a great way to keep track of important metrics and are a useful tool to help executive teams see where the organization is heading. The executives can maneuver the plans based on the latest trends on the dashboards.…

Over the past several years I have been a part of numerous SharePoint projects and have been involved with the SharePoint community in a number of ways.  Through these experiences I have noted several common factors that may lead to…

Navigating the rough seas of today’s tough economic climate is as difficult as ever.  With profits falling, costs rising, and lending practices tighter than ever, today’s business leaders are constantly looking for undiscovered cost advantages to give them an edge…

Server hardware and server administration is a complex industry. Maybe you have seen an old server sitting in the closet at your office. Or even worse, maybe you’re still using that obsolete server to host your applications. This situation is…

When I applied for my first mortgage in 1996, I qualified for almost five times what I needed. The issue was I only wanted the amount I was looking for and could afford. The broker tried to explain to me…

One of the evolving frontiers within business intelligence is gathering insight from the world of unstructured data.  Particularly in the web 2.0 world, data volumes are not just growing but exploding.  Twitter is a great example.  For companies looking for…

I have spent a number of years going to customer on-sites and training them on how to create dashboards. Throughout these training, I have been asked many times about how they can determine the right metrics (aka KPIs) and how…

Let me put it to you straight. I’m not talking about an ocean view or a magnificent city view from the corner office. This is in reference to a real-time view into the operations and performance of your organization. An…

Measuring ROI from a dashboard deployment can be challenging because a lot of ROI is what we would deem as “soft” ROI. Also, much of the value of dashboards comes from things like time savings, better access to data and better…

Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO, wrote in his blog “Evidence-based decisions” that within a few weeks of launching the Federal IT Dashboard the Department of Veteran Affairs announced halting of 45 IT projects worth approximately $200 million which were either behind…