How To De-clutter Your BI Dashboards To Discover Key Insights

Data, the primary key to everyday business opportunities, has gotten complex over the years due to technological challenges like data blending and data wrangling. The numerous complexities are a result of the scope and variety of big data and the integration of visualization and analytics tools. These glitches have not only slowed down data preparation but also affected the analytics stage. The effective use of data preparation tools can reverse the cycle of 80:20 ratios for data preparation and analytics into 20:80 proportions. In order to bring about this reversal, and accelerate the data preparation process, reduce waste and rework, and minimize complexity, data dashboards – the center of all data compilation and extraction- have to be effectively organized.

A data dashboard is the core information management system that helps to visually track, analyze and display the metrics of your business, key performance indicators, and other tandems that constitute the health of a business. These dashboards are customized according to the workflow process, and it is a superfluous system that connects all your data in the backdrop but presents it in the form of gauges and interpretable data. While the use of this system ensures real-time management of a business with integrated technology, most businesses fail to use them to their maximum potential because of inefficient structuring or organizing.

Three effective ways to prep your data dashboard for better productivity within a business are:

1. Streamline the right metrics: Most times, businesses just load up all their data and pick only the flashy appealing numbers and leave out the gruesome details. This is because the data entered is having too many metrics to filter out. The best strategy would be to set up only the crucial metrics for your business and streamline the rest of the data around these core metrics so that data inputs are the same but only better. Marketing data is the core of operations for an advertising company. If this company has finance at its core and marketing aligned as a subset, then the data generated will be drastically different from what is really required.

2. Don’t bog down with vanity metrics: A services related business does not require a crucial input from social media score, so, moving it to a different composition can ensure that sales are the prime focus and marketing is a secondary focus. All irrelevant metrics are crucial to a business and cannot be ignored, ensuring that all these dashboards are separately set up, monitored, and then integrated into the core reports can dramatically double up data efficiency.

3. Integrate into the open: Every department in a business is overprotective and keen on not opening their books to other departments. Just like a business needs open channels between all departments, the data on the dashboard should be open to the crucial analysts of each department and not restricted to a narrow channel at the end of the line. Allowing branching out ensures that some key factors can be interchangeably used by the unrelated department to identify crucial problems.

How Can you help?: While the above factors can benefit across the business, individual analysts too should help to de-clutter and effectively streamline data on the dashboard.The best ways to regulate the effective prep data for the dashboard would be to:

• Focus on what task you have been assigned so that too many people do not enter irrelevant feeds into the dashboard. Organize your team to handle each metrics individually, and streamline the dashboard.
• Don’t focus on dolling up a visually appealing end report. Set data as your priority on your dashboard and use the actual data to finish the end reports. This will ensure a solid output rather than just figurative numbers.
• Stay away from data that is beyond your scope. Feeding on data through automation tools can help avoid human errors.
• Do not dissect the data till you have integrated them across all metrics of the business. Instead of trying to break down data where and how you want, categorical logging will ensure the data is recorded at every required base and not lost in transition through channels.
• Follow the business’s categorization protocol, remove duplicate data, and scrub out both the dirty data (useless data) and outdated data.
• Lastly, don’t try to fit the data from the board into the wrong puzzle, sort it and match it. Also, ensure to check, revise, and update any misconnecting data that can churn out inefficient results.

The constant up gradation of algorithms will require the analysts and users of data dashboard to think on their feet and adapt clear-cut methods to align the dashboard to generate utility value. Every business has its own needs, but if they reorganize and simplify the collection of data, then there could be no hurdles to insightful analytics.

How Big Data Will Change Businesses In 2018

Market trends suggest that with an approximate growth of about $7.3 billion in 2018, the big data market size will be bound to break the $40 billion mark by the end of the year. The demanding growth in big data analytics has induced various industries to begin implementing and updating their big data systems to adapt to the higher workloads.

Structured and unstructured data has cracked the world of computational data and analytics into a divide. While algorithms and tools have enabled the easy categorization of structured data, unstructured data is left unsorted due to its complexity beyond the comprehension of simple tools. Unstructured data has been left out of most databases and wasted simply due to the sheer impossibility to classify or structure it into simpler forms.

Increased integration of business intelligence tools:

The implementation of machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and neural networks into the working processes of industries have begun to rapidly shrink the gap between structured and unstructured data. The intensive research in the fields of business intelligence is ensuring that all unstructured forms of data are analyzed, organized, scaled, and even used to predict trends which will not just generate viable data but also offer the required advantage for businesses to tap into unforeseen patterns to dramatically improve their key processes. Forrester has predicted that, with more than 70% of businesses integrating AI modules, businesses will have to be quicker and “think on their feet” to quickly tap into the upcoming trends and beat the competition.

The structuring of dark data:

Dark data that has constantly been discarded as unusable and left literally in the dark due to the unavailability of resources or appropriate tools will be streamlined into usable data with the use of these business intelligence tools. By processing and analyzing the old databases as well as that which will be acquired in the future, these business intelligence tools will help detect the often unaware or neglected quality anomalies. This enhancement will not just enable a correction in the business process but also augment the success of many businesses that have lost out on the competition.

Increased impact of IoT:

Further, Internet of Things (IoT), which has thus far proved to have a great impact on big data, will create a greater wave in the transfer of data through sensor technology. Many businesses are benefiting better by cashing in on the benefits of IoT enabled networks as compared to those businesses that are still hooked to outdated forms. An apparent benefactor of IoT would be retail businesses as they would be able to analyze their customer behaviors and other trends in real time through the data generated from their equipped smart stores. A simple sensor on a rack can help with real-time inventory management.

The greater shift from remote servers to cloud storage:

Another component that business will have to adapt to without fail for the success of the integration of these business intelligence tools would be cloud storage. These business intelligence components would cease to exist if businesses fail to utilize either or both cloud storage and cloud computing platforms to effectively collect, analyze or process any data. Accessibility to real-time data without the constraint of limited storage, like that of remote servers, is crucial not just for in-house data but also for the overall smooth management of every component of business intelligence tools.

Checking and updating security protocol:

Most importantly, or rather more obviously, another component that businesses cannot afford to lose out on is security protocol. With the extensive use of cloud technology, security risks are higher, and therefore require the constant upgradation of cutting-edge security measures to fight against cloud security threats. A simple breach could cause loss of sensitive data and repeated damaging attacks that could devastate the business. Business intelligence tools like AI have dedicated protective platforms that could avert a crisis even before occurrence that could otherwise be impossible for a human workforce to even control after a hack.

The need for big data and its smooth integration has been happening at a rapid pace in the past few years, and the current need of the hour is maximum utilization of these resources for a successful and disaster-free future for businesses. With a lot of businesses changing the current from the traditional to technological cores, the constant revision of algorithms is required to gain the edge over competitors. This year is all prepped for data-driven – innovation, discovery, and inventions.

Why you need to consider building on React.js

So what is React?

React is a JavaScript library for building User Interfaces. It is often misinterpreted as language, tool, or a framework. To put it simply, React ensures the developers can create large web applications which use data that can change over time, without the need to reload the page. The main goal is to be fast, simple and scalable. React processes only user interface in applications.

It is simply a JavaScript runtime. Lightweight, modern and fast way to execute code

Let’s see why some of the biggest names use react

Facebook

Interestingly, Facebook created ReactJS library, which is why it is obvious they would use it for the Facebook app. Facebook has recently opened a beta of its completely rewritten ReactJS, called React Fiber.

Instagram

Instagram is completely based on the ReactJS library with its users completely adapting to its amazing features.The use of ReactJS within Instagram is huge with various features including the Google Maps APIs, geo locations, search engine accuracy as well as tags that pop out without hashtags.

Netflix

The React version works with Netflix too – specifically on their platform called Gibbon which is used for low-performance TV devices instead of the DOM used in web browsers. There is also an official blog post by Netflix explaining how the ReactJS library helps their runtime performance, startup speed, modularity and various other advantages.

New York Times

A couple of months ago, New York Times has designed a great new project that simulates different looks of stars on Oscar red carpet. This project’s interface was built in React and allows the users to filter the gallery of different photos from 19 years in a fast and nice way. The re-rendering on this project is one of the impressive features of React

WhatsApp

WhatsApp too uses ReactJS for building user interfaces, like the way it uses Underscore.js and Velocity.js as some of its most efficient engines. The newly launched WhatsApp Web app has also been using React.

Let’s look at what makes React this amazing

1. The Virtual DOM

Imagine a page has a button that changes the color of some text when clicked. It doesn’t make much sense to re-render the entire page for that. React plays smartly here and re-render only the text that changed color and leaves the rest of the page untouched. React keeps a virtual representation of an application’s page structure in memory while comparing it to any incoming changes. Anytime a render is required, React compares the incoming changes to the previous page and only updates the parts that were actually manipulated. This allows React to perform very efficiently and is its most impressive feature.

2. Reusable Components

React strongly encourages the use of components, a huge time-saver when it comes to development. A component could be anything a button, a navigation bar, a registration form, whatever an application needs. Once a component is built, it can be used over and over again throughout an app. Smaller components can be used together to create more complex components and different data can be passed into components to create unique instances. Not only does this save you time but it makes it easy to keep a consistent look and feel across your application.

3. JSX

JSX allows developers to write HTML-like code right into their JavaScript. React takes care of the heavy lifting by transforming the JSX into React compatible code. Most developers are familiar with HTML syntax and it allows them to picture the structure of the component or page they are building more easily.

4. Community Support

React is maintained by Facebook and Instagram but also has a great open-source community. There are a ton of React-specific solutions for any problem you may face. There are numerous component libraries that offer different buttons, modals, progress bars and more.

5. Learning Curve

Frameworks like Angular are much more complex and come pre-loaded with many other features. React is flexible in this regard and many times you’ll want to pair React with routing, state management, and other libraries to create a robust application. Even after adding additional packages to a project, React is still extremely intuitive to use.

React has its pitfalls as well, but the pros far outweigh the cons. The virtual DOM makes it extremely fast, component use cuts development time, JSX helps make coding with React feel more familiar, and it’s easy to pick up and get started with quickly.

Going headless with Magento

The Headless CMS architecture is steadily rising in popularity. This model allows completely custom user experiences while providing developers the great flexibility to innovate. It also helps website owners to future-proof their builds by allowing them to update the design without re-implementing the whole CMS. With all this upside, it’s no wonder this type of build has gained serious traction in Magento community off late.

It may be a tad hard to understand why this is needed or what it actually involves. Let’s get little deeper into figuring what and how. The headless Magento will run on original Magento application, but the application is not outputting anything to the browser.

Let’s take a product listing example. In the HTML page, you could create placeholders for the products so that every product looks similar. Then each product would be fetched one-by-one by JavaScript remotely and replace the placeholder. Applying the same principle to the checkout or customer pages would also require a push of data back to the Magento server.

Why go headless with Magento?

One of the benefits is that JavaScript is loosely coupled with Magento backend and which JavaScript framework to use would become a frontend developers choice, instead of KnockoutJS being now a solid requirement for developing in Magento.

Also, this would mean that there is no need for Magento developer’s to worry about designing on Magento. Instead, the focus can be on a REST API that simply offers everything that needs to be loaded. Magento provides a flexible framework that can be used to build custom logic on pricing, logins, checkout, etc. However, this contains a lot of additional stuff that is not needed. Building your own pricing rules might be easier than trying to extend and modify the Magento pricing rule system. It might require effort. But you will be dumping a lot of complex logic, in favor of code that simply works the way you want it to work.

Challenges of going headless on Magento

Cost of implementing headless approach with Magento

One of the biggest challenges of headless Magento applications is replacing the full presentation stack of Magento is not a trivial task. One of the strategies is to only replace key pages of a site such as home page, product navigation, and browsing, basically focusing on the navigation and discovery experience. In such strategies, other pages such as checkout or order history are left untouched. Another strategy is to replace the whole presentation tier. The cost of the two approaches is very different.

So a key decision is a value of replacing the Magento presentation tier. Each merchant needs to consider that trade-off. A part of the value of the Adobe and Acquia partnerships is that much of this integration effort is being solved up front, removing that overhead per site. But in general, headless strategies at present will be a higher cost than using the native Magento presentation tier

Using extensions with Magento

In Magento, extensions can plug themselves into the default Magento pages using the Magento layout engine. A key design goal of Magento is that you can purchase an extension and have it “just work”.

Extensions can be back-end oriented (e.g. a different tax calculation engine, a different promotions engine, etc). These extensions have minimal or no change in the consumer experience (presentation tier) and so are easy to add to a headless Magento installation.

The problem occurs for the extensions that enhance the presentation tier. Address verification, smarter merchandising, a search extension with auto-complete – extensions frequently inject additional JavaScript into a site to provide a better consumer experience. Injecting JavaScript into the Magento presentation tier does not help a headless deployment. If a headless Magento installation manually merges JavaScript from extensions into its code base, care must be taken to correctly apply future patches provided with that extension.

In Conclusion

By shifting responsibility for the user experience completely to the browser, the headless model provides a number of benefits such as:

1.  It allows the site owner to redesign the site without re-implementing the CMS
2. It gives frontend specialists full control over the user experience using their native tools.
3. Speeds up the site by shifting display logic to the client-side and streamlining the backend. An application focused on delivering content can be much more responsive than one that assembles completely formatted responses based on complex rules.
4. Builds true interactive experiences for users by using the website to powerfully function in-browser applications. The backend becomes the system of record and “state machine”, but back-and-forth interaction happens real-time in the browser.
5. Headless website development has the potential to unleash the creative power of frontend developers to deliver richer, faster, and more responsive user experiences.

Is “headless Magento” a major strategic direction for the future? That would be overstating it. But it is a valid use case that Magento will continue to support.