Earlier this week I had a briefing with Visual Mining to learn about their new release, NetCharts Performance Dashboards (NCPD) 2.0. Aside from being impressed with their demo, one of the things that I noticed was their focus on the business user. Their key target is mid-market CFOs, but with that comes the realization that in order for dashboards to be successful within mid-sized organizations, they need to be easy to use, to develop, and to customize at the individual user level.  Otherwise they defeat the purpose and can’t provide great business value to business users. In addition, they back their new solution with a risk free money back guarantee.  This means that in addition to providing a dashboard solution that is easy to interact with, they are giving mid-market companies a way to engage in dashboard deployments without the risk inherent in a high cost project with variable returns.

Due to the increase in free software offerings that give companies free access to software, solution providers are starting to develop alternative ways to compete with these free offerings while giving future customers added value.  Mid-market companies are now able to evaluate solutions and deploy dashboards or business intelligence solutions without having to worry about failed projects and wasted budget allocations. Overall, it is interesting to see the increasing focus of dashboard design that targets business users as well as provides dollar value to the overall organization.  This combination will help the role of dashboards expand within the organization both in terms of usage and popularity.