Blumen Research

Software for business analytics & dashboards

After testing the boundaries with my last post on integrating Twitter within time dependent market research reports I am going to try to take a look at a more traditional topic, Software for Business Analytics & Dashboards.

“Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning.” Wikipedia

The area of business analytics and dashboards for business intelligence is fairly new to me and I have been researching two tools to possibly assist in market research visualization from the business analytics sector. My preferred choice of software for customer satisfaction and market research analysis is a combination of Minitab and Excel. The two pieces of software I am currently considering to add to the lineup are Xcelius by SAP and GoodData a start up in the analytics space.

My interest lies in integrating research data with customer relationship management data in an easy to understand format, where users would be able to quickly get an upper level view of the impact of customer satisfaction and recommendation on their bottom line and the ability to drill down into specific demographics. The main idea would be to provide the client with a detailed customer satisfaction and recommendation report and then a tailored made dashboard for presentations, meetings with management and real time monitoring.

Xcelsius: My experience so far has been extremely positive. The software comes prepackaged with dashboard examples for sales, marketing, HR, personal finance and other templates. By opening and playing around with the templates you can see how data is linked to the data file (an excel file) and how to filter and drill down within your data set. The dashboards themselves look professional and you can easily change the appearance with a few clicks. Tabbing features also allow you to pretty much build out a small reporting tool rather than a one screen dashboard.  The most impressive feature in my opinion would have to be the What if? Analysis. Where you can play out various scenarios and view their impact, such as raising the budget for a specific department and viewing the impact on sales revenue.

Export: Adobe PDF, BusinessObjects Enterprise, Crystal Reports Server, Flash, HTML, PowerPoint and Word

GoodData: Store your data in the cloud via Amazon Web Services, report, analyze, share & collaborate around your business data. The main purpose is to drill down with your data and visualize your business data utilizing various charting features.
 
“Good Data takes a different approach, assuming we would not be constrained by the container or the cluster. We made ad hoc analysis as fast and simple as prescriptive BI. That means new queries on new data sets are as easy as repeated queries on predicted data. Smart in-memory query processing and extensive results caching get over the performance hurdles.” Good Data Site

Export: Microsoft Excel, PDF format or embed reports into any site.

While the two platforms overlap, Xcelsius seems to offer more choice with regard to data visualization and analysis while GoodData has an option and focus within collaboration.

Track emerging trends using the Palm Trend Tracker

In an interesting new advertising campaign and a bonus to market researchers conducting analysis on web trends, palm in collaboration with Federated Media has produced a twitter Trend Tracker. While not the first tracker to hit the market, the free tool is definitely a helpful addition to the mix.

Currently the tool focuses on a 24 hour time period with the current top 20 trends on the left hand menu and tweets on the topic located under the spectacularly gorgeous time chart. Along with the frequency graph the site also includes a twitter map that shows you where the tweets are coming in from.

The site in its current format is not that interesting, but will definitely be getting interesting once they include 30, 90 and hopefully a selection of your own dates to track trends via twitter.

Here’s hoping it improves for the market research community.