The Art of Knowledge
Business Objects
Business Objectsi s a company that sells Enterprise solutions to the market. They have this really cool thing called dashboards. A dashboard manager is basically a:
- Dashboard Manager enables you to deploy dashboards and scorecards that highlight business metrics that are critical to organizational strategy. This visibility helps users focus their efforts on initiatives that have the biggest impact on corporate strategy. This alignment to strategy improves organizational performance through better decision making. And Dashboard Manager is agile enough to let you quickly evolve your dashboard as business strategy changes.
Ok so what's a dashboard?
From what I gather, and no they don't have a straight forward definition, (I guess that would be like Microsoft saying, "This is a window.") it measures productivity and provides a corporate wide face to all tasks. It allows for the common voice on high to send down the message through the infrastructure via technology.
What suprises me is that they don't consider IT one of their core competency components when it comes to revolutionizing business. Last time I looked, and it was yesterday, most companies revolve around IT. IT funds initiatives via streamlined efforts made to streamline processes. It always amazes me a little when people think of IT as this autonomous component that knows what they are doing at all times. Honestly, IT may be the most screwed up part of any company. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is volatility and exponential change. IT has to deal with rapid movement and become synonymous with change, if that's not the breading ground for metrics and tracking ROI, I don't know what is.
What they basically do, from what I gather, is that they take information or business processes and they transfer them into objects. I.e. they take what you did today and make that available to you tomorrow. The medium in which it is available can now change and become adaptable to user preference or atmosphere. Let's say you get a task via your dashboard and then accomplish your task. While you are doing work the app tracks your resources and categorizes them for future reference. Your end result, whether it be a balance sheet, email, or report is then transferred into an objects database and meta tagged (maybe) with XML to make it viable for other relative tasks. It also creates a huge knowledge base. Anyway, it's kinda cool what they are doing...and apparently they have been around for a while.
Link posted by JVMM : 5:45 PM