Our First Big Win: The Ventana Research Innovation Awards
We are still reeling here at VisualCue. On October 21st our CEO, Kerry Gilger, was in San Francisco to accept the Ventana Research Information Technology Innovation Award in Business Intelligence. Being the first major award we have garnered as an organization, there was much congratulatory hand-shaking and back-slapping as we placed it right in the middle of our Orlando offices. And we felt we deserved to celebrate; what was an interesting idea two years ago had grown from risky gamble to professionally recognized platform.
Then, an interesting transformation occurred: the glass statue started to grow. Pretty soon it dominated the entire room and was always on our minds.
Before long this is how it looked to all of us. An enormous, shining reminder that things around here have changed, but we couldn’t figure out how exactly. So we asked some hard questions, namely what does a win really mean and where do we go from here? After some reflection and research over the past weeks, here is what we came up with.Read more
Analytics and Big Data – Press pause on the Stairmaster
Our lives have become hectic. We are working harder and longer. We talk about life balance, but for so many of us we continue to have imbalance. Every once in a while we need to step back, press the “pause” button on the Stairmaster exercise machine, take some deep breaths, and reflect on just what the heck is going on. I’d like to reflect with you my take on what is driving the accelerating interest in analytics and Big Data.Read more
Revealing the missing link.
Supply chain performance is crucial to the success of many companies. The supply chain process contains many moving parts each dependent on the execution of the process that precedes it in the flow. Every company employs some sort of system to monitor, manage and tune the complete process cycle. These systems employ everything from hand written reports to spreadsheets to elaborate dashboards. Many times users need to link to multiple systems to get a complete understanding of what is happening—probably one of the highlights of your day: “Honey, guess what I got to do at work today?…Sift through tons of spreadsheets and dashboards to figure out what’s going on at work.” (End of sarcastic voice). Needless to say, it doesn’t feel like time well spent, but you know that there are important performance issues hidden within the data.Read more
Do you fear your data? Here’s a thought…
I’m going to say something, and it might make some people out there a little miffed, but here goes- spreadsheets can be the worst. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not talking about the data that gets shoveled into that sheet, which is the good stuff, the life-blood of any enterprise. It’s just how that data has been presented that gives me an ulcer: columns with numbers that have combined other numbers to produce numbers that mean something. To me, data in a spreadsheet can almost be as meaningless as just saying numbers over and over again. An excel wizard I am not.Read more