Fun interface to boring data as a business?
Juice Analytics has a great post about huge gap in quality and ease-of-use between consumer-oriented reporting interfaces and those typically found in enterprise software. Zach makes the point that the enterprise reporting, besides coming last in the development process, usually puts raw data above insights and values quantity over quality.
Doug McClure wonders whether this represents an underserved business niche for some new start-up explore. I’d say hell, yes!
Presenting information has a lot of know-how and it’s definitely transferable. It doesn’t matter whether you’re displaying sales of widgets or inventory of beef cows, time series is still a time series and the thing people making decision want to know is the same. It’s the “so what” or “why do I care”. And typical enterprise reporting interface sucks at doing that.
One could easily imagine a start-up staffed with people who know how to extract the “so what” from a data dump, people with interface design skills and yes, some graphic designers to make looking at it all much less a chore.
Any takers?
Add comment June 1st, 2006
