Today's end users want to use their reporting tools for advanced analytics strategies. They are aware of the litany of benefits more sophisticated business intelligence applications offer, whether it involves using prescriptive analytics to understand consumer activity or improve measurements for supply chain effectiveness. In order to ascend to this level of insight, however, end users depend on the quality of their reporting tools and applications.
Organizational environments in which many users have little background knowledge of software development can lead to issues, wrote O'Reilly Media contributor Ben Lorica. It puts the bulk of effective software utilization on programmers, who must work within the parameters of business logic and employee capability to deliver applications capable of supporting advanced analytics insights.
Component suites are essential for the sort of efficient, highly intuitive software development necessary for today's analytics objectives. A foundational facet of software development today, component suites are packages of specific controls assembled to be used on a certain platform, such as ASP.NET, WinForms or WPF Windows Store. Selecting one for development helps programmers create mobile and desktop applications that offer the high level of interactive analytics tools that advanced analysis requires.
The influx of non-data scientist end users into the advanced analytics department creates a need to simplify critical data tasks. These activities can include interactive analysis, data visualization, data preparation and information scaling. With component suites, developers can create user-friendly tools that provide opportunities for end users to transcend simple analysis and work in a higher plane of advanced analytical understanding.
The six traits of advanced data visualization
According to a report by Forrester Research analysts Boris Evelson and Noel Yuhanna, there are six factors separating static analysis and advanced data visualization:
- Dynamic data
- Visual querying
- Linked multi-dimensional visualization
- Animation
- Personalization
- Actionable alerts
These six factors all contribute to a system in which access, visuals and analysis are all shaped by user preferences and knowledge. It is also a smart framework that provides automatic reconfigurations and seamless display between charts and other visuals, so that data amended in one visual does not have to be manually reconfigured in another.
Highlighting the benefits of component suites
Whether component suites are intended for use in HTML5, WPF, ASP.NET or other design frameworks, they enable software developers and end users to take advantage of the traits that factor into advanced data visualizations.
- Windows: With WinForms user interface and ActiveX controls, it is easy for developers to build intuitive, sophisticated and highly responsive apps and reporting tools with a high level of customization and a steady, approachable learning curve.
- Web: Diversity in Web development is important, especially for integrating the database querying and data visualization strategies essential to achieving advanced analysis. Developers can leverage UI controls in WebForms or HTML5 to build themed, highly capable Web apps prepared for the full spectrum of potential deployments.
- XAML: Whether on Windows Phone or WPF, XAML provides end users with the tools to put business intelligence to work. Developers can use XAML component suites to build powerful applications that can be easily understood by users.
Development studios are critical to providing advanced analytics applications and data visualization tools that actually work. In an era increasingly dominated by data analytics, it is important that enterprise apps have universal usability and appeal.
MESCIUS inc.