Dashboards: Program turns data into usable Web displays

The head honchos of corporate America now have another tool to help them steer their companies along the path to profitability.

New "dashboard" products from Lindon-based Corda Technologies are electronic displays that convert company database information into easy-to-understand charts, graphs and maps to Web displays, keeping executives and others in the business from slogging through a stack of printed pages mucked up with column after column of mind-numbing numbers.

What's more, CEOs can let managers, sales reps and others access elements for their own dashboards, allowing them to see how much horsepower they're adding — or taking away — from the corporate engine.

"Companies have this data. The data is there, but it's not useful," said David Vandagriff, vice president of marketing for Corda. "They've (put their) money on the big Oracle databases and the boxes to run the big Oracle databases, but they're not getting useful information about how to run their business out of those systems.

"For a relatively small sum of money, compared to what they've already spent, we can give them a way of looking at that data and understanding it so it's really useful, not just for one or two people in the IT department and not just for CEO, but for anybody in the organization who needs to know the information."

The dashboards are part of the evolution of Corda's other technologies. PopChart allows Web site developers to produce interactive charts — just run the cursor over an element and quick-read details of that element pop up — and drill-down capabilities that bring up additional bits of information about those elements. Corda's OptiMap works the same way but uses geographic representations for pop-ups and drill-down.

The dashboards convert database numbers into graphs transferred to the browser, with drill-down to an infinite number of levels. That allows the CEO or others to easily and quickly track sales, production, staffing and other pertinent information.

"At a glance, you can visually see if everything is OK," Vandagriff said.

"I can see all these things in numbers and tables and Excel spreadsheets, but the dashboard lets me visually see what's going on much better and allows me to do drill-down. This information is in all the databases, but without the dashboard, it's virtually nonexistent."

Problem areas are easily spotted.

"The dashboard lets me as an executive see, am I exceeding the speed limit here, is my engine running too hot — all the things the metaphor works for in the automobile," he said.

Companies can decide how quickly to update the databases, and, thus, the dashboards.