Data Integration Is What It’s All About These Days

April 18, 2017 by guest author, Daniel Waldron

Guest Post: Loren Bucklin, ConnectedSign

Loren Bucklin

Data integration is really what sophisticated digital signage is all about these days – using real-time information to generate relevant, easily consumed visuals for screens.

Done well for businesses, it can do things like help staff to keep the mission, vision and values of their company top of mind.

For example, a C-level airline executive walking through a lobby and seeing this kind of data-driven social media dashboard on a video wall would instantly know there was a problem that needed to get addressed …

Anyone who didn’t already know the situation would be inclined to call a meeting, real fast, to find out why social media was blowing up about something involving the company.

That’s just a word cloud – a really simple tool to visually reflect data from a business intelligence integration.

Visualizing data for business can take many forms these days. The most common is live data linking – creating a structure that allows a visual display of data coming from sources like SQL databases, spreadsheets and other familiar data points.

Many organizations have invested in gathering data from various sources. Dashboards and trend charts can do things like dynamically reflect right-time updated information, surface lagging and leading indicators, and show KPIs. They can make data fun and easy to consume across the width and depth of an organization.

But there’s an inherent problem. Sending charts around by emails or linking to them on the intranet means, in many organizations, only a percentage of people seem them,

First, email open rates are never what HR people hope they’d be inside companies. But the bigger issue – many workers in companies aren’t operating off dedicated desktops. Many might not even have company emails.

Digital signs, visible to everyone on a campus or facility, ensure business communicators get all eyes on core messages.

Business Intelligence is the hot new term for data consumers, and it has created a new need to visualize data in larger formats. Of course, the web-based dashboards work fine for what they are designed to do, but you may need to think bigger!

Think of a large array of video panels in an office or factory area that’s displaying dynamic visualizations of specific data points. That data can now be “behaved” so that consumers are only presented with information that is important at that moment in time. They don’t have to study and make decisions about the data because the display system is presenting only the stuff they need, when they need it.

Digital signage has been the workhorse for data visualization. Multiple panel installations in a gang or single displays at individual locations allow rapid data deployment across an enterprise. Internal visual communication has become the norm and business intelligence has made it more necessary than ever.

If data is worth collecting and analyzing, display it big!

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