New Looks for Intranets and Dashboards
Intranets contain dashboards that offer similar options for a variety of purposes for employees. Often, they’re deployed for internal uses, such as applications for human resources, accounts payable, or inter- and intra-department communication. Specific use cases include “sharing information about how to learn about the company, training, expense reports, travel, policy administration, and policy publication,” Crawford commented.
The advantage of relying on intranets for such deployments is that, with most implementations, organizations don’t have the safety concerns of their valued information traversing into the public web. Nonetheless, there’s a cost tradeoff with intranets. There are resources available on the public internet that are increasingly being used for intranet purposes—with lower costs than those for developing bespoke intranet options. “Some organizations have dedicated intranets, whereas others are more repurposing SharePoint as an intranet,” Crawford observed. “The SharePoint example can range in maturity.” It’s up to organizations to decide how much they want to spend.
Workflow Improvement
Some of the most compelling developments affecting the dashboard space entail relying on these mechanisms to implement, track, and further workflows. Historically, dashboards have served as analytics instruments for illustrating—via the intuitive means Crawford mentioned—the results of data-centric computations for business intelligence. Although this analytics use case still persists, the information that dashboards present in today’s applications also includes recommendations and next steps. This expansion of their enterprise utility is suggestive of the overall preference for a form of self-service, a visual context to understand and capitalize on KM. “We all know we’re overwhelmed with information, and dashboards help us stay organized and on task,” Crawford noted.
The operational functionality of dashboards is integral for this purpose and may be on its way to becoming as useful as its analytics functionality. In both cases, users can select specific metrics (for workflows and analytics, respectively) and monitor updates to track their status. For workflows, those updates may include notifications or alerts that there are “three action items that require immediate attention,” Crawford remarked. “You want to be able to immediately click on that and take action, or make a decision on it, or memorialize a decision so it’s in your data and easy to see when you log in.”
Specific Widgets
There are a host of widgets for organizations to choose from that supply the visual constructs that have always been central to the consumer or enterprise value of dashboards. One of the more recent developments impacting this dimension of dashboards and intranets is natural language interfaces—courtesy of generative models—through which one can specify, refine, and tailor these visual mechanisms.
The most pervasive widgets are those that are decidedly time-honored. According to Crawford, “People love a beautiful visualization. It’s intriguing to see a colorful map that says, ‘Click on this … to see all the citations applicable to the retention obligations for a country.’” Pie charts, bar graphs, and line graphs are also still widely deployed to illustrate information. Depending on the use case, it’s not uncommon to employ dynamic visualizations that show changes over time and update in real time. Such functionality can be coupled with heatmaps, for example, as a widget that displays such changes as they relate to defined business objectives.