by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice

Dave Jacob

As a web-based, virtual employee world, Davalen is always evaluating our procedure and protocol. Obviously, the old excel spreadsheets and status reports systems just can't keep up as sales and assignments expand globally and all times of the day and night. So, how do we measure our performance?

We use business intelligence (BI) tied to our real-time systems. Since clients often do most of the fulfillment work on-line, it's critical to know when items are not lining up. Davalen has made major investments in tackling this information problem through web-based charting solutions attached to critical performance data.

Dashboards are a visual way to set metrics, alerts and exception reporting in a visual format so you know how the business is performing at any time, not after nightly reports are generated, reconciled and emailed.

Davalen is using IBM WebSphere Portal , IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory and the Davalen Chart framework to provide just this type of solution. This solution is being implementing in the energy industry to capture carbon credits for power plant generation and evaluate comparative plant performance. In the healthcare industry this solution is able to monitor and alert the necessary individuals based on pacemaker data. In the insurance industry these dashboards can be used to measure independent agent performance.

An important goal of web-based virtual business intelligence is to provide immediate feedback to the management team with a clear graphical measure of the situation, notify employees tasked with responding to the alert and monitor the alert until it is resolved. This can all be accomplished quickly and effectively with dashboarding.

Len Barker

by Len Barker, Managing Partner - Lotus Practice

It's safe to say that when a company spends money to create a software application they expect to make more money then they spent or solve a critical business problem.  One way to maximize an investment is to gather information needed to make decisions into a handy dashboard.  Dashboard's gather information from a variety of sources and display it in a manner that simplifies decision-making.  Below is a list of four of the unique ways to display your Domino data in dashboards:

The Composite Application Editor allows you to assemble pieces of different Notes applications into a single "composite" application.  The different pieces can be wired together so that actions in one portion of the composite application can affect the content of other portions of the application.  This is a quick and easy way to create a dashboard for Notes clients from existing Notes applications with minimum investment.

2. Lotus Mashups

The Lotus Mashup Center provides a quick and easy way to wire existing applications together for browser access.  It provides the same quick ROI as a composite application except that is can be used to mashup a much broader array of data.

3. XPages

With the introduction of XPages in Domino 8.5, the developer was given the ability to easily create Web 2.0 applications using Domino Designer.  Since XPages separates data and UI in an SOA manner, data can be pulled from multiple sources into one page.  XPages relies on the DOJO framework for many of its capabilities. This allows DOJO charts to display this data through visually appealing charts and graphs.

4. Plugins Built with the Lotus Expeditor Toolkit

Since the new Notes client is built on Eclipse, writing plug-ins using Eclipse and the Expeditor Toolkit can extend it.  This provides the full power of java to gather data from data sources of any type or source and pull it all together in context with what the user of the Notes client is working on.  For example, a click on a name in an email can pop up a business card that pulls the users address and phone information from LDAP and then pulsl all of their projects, publications, actions items, and vacation from four other corporate systems.

These are just four new ways that you could be gathering relevant data from Domino for users to consume in business dashboards.  Share your creative dashboard ideas by commenting on the Davalen Blog.

Peter Wilkerson

by Peter Wilkerson, Search & Discovery Practice Area Manager

Dashboards can display data fed through direct database queries or from the results of advanced search.  Since decisions are made on what the dashboard displays you need to periodically evaluate the accuracy of search within your company. So who should you ask to find out if it's working effectively? It depends on the information you need. If you want to know if the application components are working, you need to ask the IT department. If you want to know if the right results are coming back, then you need to ask a line of business user.

Why is it possible that the application components are functioning correctly and search still is not accurate? There is much more to setting up search than installation and configuration.  Optimizing search results is a team effort between a technical expert that is capable of massaging metadata and tuning the search engine and the line of business user that knows what information should be retrieved from specific queries.

Well-designed search contributes towards a well-run company. You are losing time and money if you wait for the complaint box to fill before evaluating whether your search is effective.  An example of a forward thinking company is Littleton Coin Company.  Davalen assisted Littleton Coin with the implementation of their WebSphere Commerce-based retail site several years ago; Davalen continues to team with them to improve the shopping experience through search driven navigation. This is an example of the line of business, Marketing, and technical search experts collaborating to improve a good product and drive better business results.

Visit Littleton Coin Company to purchase some coins and see an example of a site  that successfully uses well-designed search to drive category navigation. 

Davalen conducts search effectiveness audits, which includes recommendations on how to improve search. If you would like to learn more information about search effectiveness on your current system, simply fill out a contact form.