The tools of the master forecaster

Based in a small office in Houston, this five-year-old company has an interesting approach toward business reporting. Mark Palmer, CEO of ProfitMetrics, says the trick to better understanding your organization is to see it from a holistic point of view in a printout that contains as much data on your company as possible. Sounds simple enough but it’s rarely done, Palmer said.

The average PowerPoint slide has about one or two facts per page, he said. The front page of a typical newspaper has about four to 10 facts. A ProfitMetrics report about an agency can average anywhere from 60 to 100 facts per page in a format that is designed to diagnose all aspects of how the agency runs. This level of detail provides what Palmer calls a high-density dashboard view of your organization that lets you analyze trends and find anomalies in a single glance.

The software works by pulling your data from any type of database and placing that data into an input file where the metrics you chose are applied. The software is tailor-made for each organization, so these metrics can be anything from budget analysis to the employee turnover rates of a hospital over time by department.

ProfitMetrics relies exclusively on Extensible Markup Language in configuring the charts and converting the numbers into visual artifacts. So an XML editor configures the way in which the data will be displayed by creating an XML Dashboard Description file and merging that file with the input file that contains the metrics or raw data of your organization. Finally a quick rendering engine produces a high-density dashboard that can be printed out in PDF format or viewed dynamically on the Web in a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.

Despite the benefit of having your entire agency displayed on a page, the software has strong drawbacks. The most noticeable problem is that it’s difficult to use. Explaining how the software works is hard enough. There are no detail wizards to guide you through these steps. So unless you want to use the ProfitMetrics people as live-in consultants every time you want to change your template to match your agency’s needs, you’ll need an XML programmer on staff. And it wouldn’t hurt to train your database administrator to extract the data using the ProfitMetrics software.

In a live demo, Palmer even had a tough time getting the software to render images. This issue stems from the immaturity of the software and the need for a little further development. And since the software works on predefined templates, you’re limited if you want to display a metric that is special to your agency alone. And let’s face the facts: Federal, state and local agencies have a lot of data they need to render that is very different from private-sector data, and these differences may not be found in templates.

We found high pricing an issue throughout the entire review of business intelligence tools, and this product was no exception. Palmer said that the pricing and services offered are similar to what you’d expect in building Web pages.

Depending upon your agency’s needs, the Dashboard Solutions software can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000. This may not include a consulting fee you’ll need to pay if you don’t have XML-savvy staff on hand.

Despite these issues, however, I think that having this software can be a great improvement to your organization if you have the budget and the time to learn it, and particularly if you and your staff live by metrics. We look forward to product improvements, particularly in ease of use, to make this software of even greater importance to business intelligence reporting.