TIDEMARK ROLLS OUT INFOGRAPHICS THAT MAP A COMPANY’S PROFITS IN MICROSCOPIC DETAIL, IN REAL TIME.
It’s only been a few months since Tidemark, a bold Andreessen Horowitz-backed business analytics platform, emerged from its beta cocoon. But today, the fledgling company is introducing a new set of tools, aimed at helping businesses visualize their data in real time. “Business reporting is broken, stagnated decades ago, built upon stacks of dense, complex, and dated reports and dashboards that few people ever read,“ explains Founder and CEO Christian Gheorghe. "Data is nothing without context." The new feature--called Storylines--supplies visual context with a dynamic mobile interface.
Tidemark’s "Storylines" are templates that parse data into dynamic visualizations (Click Image To Enlarge)
Gheorghe’s business is based on a simple insight--that the so-called “consumerization of technology” is having a profound impact on enterprise, thanks to the ubiquity of mobile devices. “You used to go home and expect to check your email in Outlook,” he says. “Now you come to work and expect to see applications that are as simple as Facebook or LinkedIn.” As a result, there’s a real demand for business analytics tools that have the same ease of use. And perhaps more importantly, more and more employees are actually interested in engaging with the data. Gheorghe says that typically, only 4% of employees use their company’s analytics tools--his mission is to increase that number to 100%.
Storylines make it possible to change certain insights, experiment with possible outcomes, and forecast different schedules right in the visualization (Click Image To Enlarge)
The challenge, of course, is engineering a platform that’s intuitive and fine-grained enough to meaningfully engage the entire employee base of Tidemark’s target customers--enterprises with at least $500 million profits annually. Gheorghe and his team have spent the last three years building their product. Tidemark configures a company’s data by tapping into it at the source and packaging it in an incredibly intuitive iPad-based app (see Co.Design’s previous coverage here). It’s all real time, and it’s possible to drill deep into specific metrics to iterate on possible outcomes--a process that Gheorghe describes as “a continuous loop between planning a product, forecasting results, and understanding value.” The immediacy and transparency is so comparatively drastic, you could almost compare it to the invention of the X-Ray.
In the Profits storyline, you can drill into a profit map at the international, national, or state level, or parse the profits at a different date, or quarter, simply by changing the inputs on the screen (Click Image To Enlarge)
Today’s new launch is quick by some standards--after all, Tidemark was still in beta in February. But it makes sense that Gheorghe’s eye would turn to visualization after conquering the cloud-based data management itself. Called "Storylines," the new tool is a set of pre-designed visualizations that pull data directly from a company’s backend, creating a dynamic graphic that illustrates real-time metrics. The first five templates are named things like “Overall Company Health”, “What Happens If,” “Forecast Variances,” “Profitability,” and “People.” The templates were designed by Visual.ly, the online visualization marketplace that lets companies connect with a deep pool of design talent.
Or, you could parse the profits by customer (Click Image To Enlarge)
Storylines attempt to do for visualization what Tidemark is doing for analytics: pry them from the hands of peripheral experts and place them squarely in the control of employees. Say you’re in upper-level management at Chuck E. Cheese, one of Tidemark’s flagship clients. At the end of the quarter, you’d like to create a set of snappy visuals to present to the rest of your team. Typically, that would mean culling the data and presenting the final numbers to an independent designer or in-house design team, who would create a 1:1 representation of your conclusions. Storylines make it possible to change certain insights, experiment with possible outcomes, and forecast different schedules right in the visualization. For example, in a Profits storyline, you can drill into a profit map at the international, national, or state level, or parse the profits at a different date, or quarter, simply by changing the inputs on the screen. It gives employees the power to manipulate the data directly, at the touch of the screen--and it’s the future of data viz.
The idea is to let any employee test how certain inputs could affect future outcomes (Click Image To Enlarge)
Gheorghe calls this “actionable” data, and he believes it will eventually become the norm as user experience insights from consumer technology trickle into enterprise. Eventually, Tidemark will also roll out a tool that lets customers create Storylines from scratch. “In this new world, you have to have user experiences that talk, that live, that are emotive in many ways,” says Gheorghe. “Enterpise is learning from consumers, from the perspective of designing beautiful experiences, emotion, and things that are easy to use.” The proof of concept? “There’s no manual.”
Other Storylines, like "Forecast Variances" and "What Happens If," speak to the actionability of the data (Click Image To Enlarge)
COMMENTARY: Tidemark delivers analytic applications designed to accelerate deployment. Tidemark's applications leverage a powerful application platform with performance management capabilities built in, ensuring companies can quickly and easily configure their apps to their specific business requirements.
Allows companies to create business plans and financial forecasts to help drive the business towards their goals. Financial Planning includes processes for revenue planning, workforce planning, operating expense planning, capital expenditure planning, and balance sheet & cash flow planning, ensuring companies get a complete picture of their financial plans. With in-context collaboration and analysis, a business can quickly iterate with new forecasts as their business changes.
Enables You To:- Collect plan and forecast data
- Simulate what-if plans and compare scenarios
- Complete full financial plans including: revenue & margin planning, operating expense planning, workforce planning, capital expense planning, and balance sheet & cash flow planning
- Allocate with flexible methods configured to your business
- Use driver based planning
Tidemark financial planning apps for the enterprise are available for the iPad and iPhone and other mobile devices (Click Image To Enlarge)
- Act in context – get deeper analysis or collaborate right in the context of what you’re doing
- Quickly deploy - using pre-built metric definitions, business methods, and panels
- Everyone involved in the process with easy, intuitive access from anywhere
Business Value:
- Increased visibility into where the business is headed with continuous forecasting instead of annual budgeting
- Visually interact with data to model new scenarios to drive business decisions
- Full understanding of the impact of updates across the entire business – in real-time
Tidemark drives a business by capturing input from the people closest to the products & customers. Operational Planning allows them to collect operational drivers to generate financial forecasts and plans, allowing them to see the entire business plan. Connecting operational and financial planning ensures everyone in the organization is working with the same information towards the same goals.
Enables You To:
- Collect operational data and drivers
- Simulate what-if plans and compare scenarios
- Configure flexible operational metrics to your business
- Complete true driver based planning using operational metrics to drive revenue and costs
Supports Mobile Devices:
Tidemark operational planning apps for the enterprise are available for the iPad and iPhone and other mobile devices (Click Image To Enlarge)
- Act in context – get deeper analysis or collaborate right in the context of what you’re doing
- Quickly deploy - using pre-built metric definitions, business methods, and panels
- Everyone involved in the process with easy, intuitive access from anywhere
Business value:
- Adjustments to operational drivers automatically update financial results – see the impact in real-time
- Visually interact with data to model new scenarios to drive business decisions
- Push planning to the people actively engaged with products & customers to drive forecast accuracy
Quickly assess the performance of a firm's entire organization and take action when needed. Tidemark Metrics Management application enables companies to automate variance analysis to isolate issues, collect metric targets & actuals not available in source systems, collaborate in the context of their analytic process, and view the impact to financial results.
Enables You To:
- Review performance of key metrics across all lines of business
- Manually enter metrics not currently available in source systems
- See flash reporting of sales, margin, and other key metrics
- Combine financial and operational metrics in one place
- Review full financial statements
Supports Mobile Devices:
Tidemark metrics management apps for the enterprise are available for the iPad and iPhone and other mobile devices (Click Image To Enlarge)
- Act in context – get deeper analysis or collaborate right in the context of what you’re doing
- Quickly deploy - using pre-built metric definitions, business methods, and panels
- Everyone involved in the process with easy, intuitive access from anywhere
- Automate variance analysis of your key metrics
- Easily see which metrics are most at risk of missing targets, where the risk is occurring, and take corrective action
- Get a comprehensive view of the business –across lines of business and source systems
- Extend performance management beyond finance to all areas of the business
A taste of a fully real-time Tidemark Storyline.
Courtesy of an article dated March 27, 2013 appearing in Fast Company Design
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