Every App is a Dashboard

I just realized today that I can barely design an application without turning it into a dashboard. I'm really trying specifically not to build another dashboard application, but whenever I step back, it looks suspiciously similar to other dashboards I've built.

Web applications generally consist of task-oriented pages and reports. In my domain (primarily enterprise supply chain), many of the tasks are done by hand-held devices of some kind. That leaves a handful of data entry screens and the reports. Greenbar is probably not the way to go these days so the reports are going to be online. Displaying HTML tables with thousands of rows is not all that useful so we need to summarize, highlight, and allow drilldowns to details. Hmm... that sounds familiar.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's just kind of amusing. The challenge is to really think about the layout so that it provides the most value to the user, without getting trapped into assuming a grid of gauges/widgets is the way to go.

Semantic Web

I recently read an article about the semantic web. Like search, the semantic web is a powerful way for a person or organization to extract information from data. The idea (over-simplified, if not half wrong) is that a group of experts in a domain can define a way of representing data for that domain. Applications or people that generate data for that domain do so in the official format which allows computers to use that data to make inferences, i.e. "learn".

The semantic web could potentially provide even more power than search for corporations trying to optimize their business. It's a little fuzzy like search in that there is not necessarily a clear path to the one true answer. On the one hand, how do you sell someone on a dashboard that may or may not return a useful answer? But on the other hand, why shouldn't corporate dashboard users have access to tools that are powerful enough to answer questions the user hasn't even thought of yet.

At a minimum I think ideas from the semantic web can be leveraged for business intelligence analytics and could make it much easier in the future to write applications that integrate with multiple different data sources.