Some time ago I wrote about “eating our own dog food”. At the time, our application, Scoreboard was useful for our P&L monthly analysis. At the time, we had only created a few calculated KPIs from the P and L import with Connect. Today we have a rich collection of calculated KPIs that REALLY help us manage our business. My favorite is the ability to do rolling average calculated metrics instead of just “this period versus this period goal” as is so often the case with Dashboard and BSC software. We use a lot of rolling average views, 3 month rolling average, 6 month and 12 month. Then we make gauge dashboards for the current period and quad chart chart dashboards for the multiple period view.

But what do I REALLY love? Every month I prepare a presentation on the previous month’s performance. I have it in a “Briefing Book” that doesn’t change except for the date. So make it once, use it always! That’s a lot easier than updating slides! BUT what I really love is that every month, after updating the dates, I send our performance management briefing book to Microsoft PowerPoint and then EMAIL the whole presentation to our executive team for read ahead before our meeting. Sometimes, they just go through the slides and email back “looks good to me, let’s not meet!”

Here’s an example slide (it is real data).

I LOVE Scoreboard!!!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Apple’s new iPad and its lack of support for Flash graphics.  This is clearly a strategic move by Apple away from a closed technology that is fully owned by one company.  Feel free to see the irony there.

Regardless of how you feel about Apple, however, they do have a solid track record of making early, bold choices that the rest of industry follows.  Remember floppy disks?  I think Flash will continue to be supported on traditional computers for quite a while, but its heyday is behind us.  HTML 5 and native cross-platform vector graphics are the future.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

When we started writing our dashboards functionality over a year ago we had some tough choices to make.  We had an aggressive vision of creating dashboards with freeform layout, allowing users to easily move and resize objects on a blank canvas.  Think PowerPoint, as opposed to shuffling uniformly sized content boxes.  If we could pull it off we’d be lightyears ahead of our competitors.

The easy road would have been to use Flash to power our dashboards.  It was a mature, widely used technology, but something didn’t feel right.  Flash required a browser plugin, and regardless of how ubiquitous it was, it didn’t fit with the philosophy of the open web.

Instead we decided to code our dashboards in 100% HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  It wasn’t the easiest development path, or the quickest, but we felt it was the “right” thing to do.

It’s now a year later, and our customers love the new software.  Our dashboards are everything we hoped they’d be, and our architectural decision to forgo Flash was a distant memory.

Until today.

While our flash-based competitors are scrambling to explain why devices like the iPad aren’t important, we leave that choice to our customers and just ship software that works everywhere.

To be fair, there’s no way we could have known the iPad was coming.  We didn’t have a crystal ball or some sort of extraordinary insight that others didn’t.  What we did have, though, is a development philosophy that favors open standards and cutting-edge research and development.

I couldn’t be more happy with where our software is today.