What Are the Drawbacks of the Dashboards Included in ESRI Software?
ESRI, known for its Geographic Information System (GIS) software, offers various dashboard solutions to visualize and analyze spatial data. While ESRI's dashboards are powerful tools for geospatial analysis and decision-making, they do have some potential drawbacks that users should be aware of:
- Complexity of Configuration:
- ESRI dashboards can be complex to set up and configure, especially for users who are not familiar with GIS concepts or ESRI's software ecosystem. Integrating data from multiple sources, configuring widgets, and designing layouts may require technical expertise and training.
- Cost of Licensing and Maintenance:
- ESRI software licenses can be costly, particularly for organizations requiring advanced features or access to premium dashboard solutions. Additionally, ongoing maintenance fees and subscription costs can add up over time, especially for large-scale deployments.
- Resource Intensive:
- ESRI dashboards may require significant computational resources, particularly when handling large datasets or complex analytical tasks. Users may experience performance issues or latency, especially when running intensive geospatial analyses or rendering complex visualizations.
- Learning Curve:
- ESRI software has a steep learning curve, especially for new users or those transitioning from other GIS platforms. Understanding the terminology, workflows, and capabilities of ESRI dashboards may require dedicated training and support.
- Limited Customization Options:
- While ESRI dashboards offer a range of customizable widgets and templates, users may find certain limitations in terms of design flexibility and customization options. Customizing layouts, styles, and interactions beyond the built-in features may require advanced coding or development skills.
- Dependency on ESRI Ecosystem:
- ESRI dashboards are tightly integrated with the ESRI ecosystem, including ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Pro, and other ESRI software products. Users may face limitations or compatibility issues when integrating data from non-ESRI sources or working in hybrid GIS environments.
- Data Security and Privacy Concerns:
- Storing sensitive or proprietary data in ESRI dashboards hosted on ArcGIS Online or other cloud-based platforms may raise data security and privacy concerns. Users must ensure compliance with data protection regulations and implement appropriate security measures to safeguard sensitive information.
- Limited Offline Access:
- ESRI dashboards may have limited offline capabilities, particularly when accessing data from ArcGIS Online or other cloud-based platforms. Users operating in remote or disconnected environments may encounter challenges accessing and updating dashboard content offline.
- Dependency on Internet Connectivity:
- ESRI dashboards rely on internet connectivity to access and update data from ArcGIS Online or other online sources. Users in areas with limited or unreliable internet connectivity may experience difficulties accessing real-time data or synchronizing updates.
- Vendor Lock-In:
- Organizations heavily invested in the ESRI ecosystem may face vendor lock-in, making it challenging to migrate to alternative GIS platforms or integrate with non-ESRI systems. This dependency on ESRI's proprietary technologies may limit flexibility and interoperability in the long run.
More Resources and Articles about InetSoft's Alternative to ESRI Dashboards
About the Benefits of Business Intelligence - Below you will find articles having to do with the benefits of business intelligence. Read about how people are using InetSoft's BI software to increase their speed of decision-making and access to information. Understanding Corporate Business Intelligence Applications - Looking for a good corporate business intelligence application? InetSoft is a pioneer in dashboard reporting, and our platform includes a powerful, flexible data mashup engine for generating complete views of corporate performance. View a demo and try interactive examples...
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Check the Interactive Airport Delay Visualization - All your bags are packed and you're ready to go...but have you checked to see if there any delays at the airport? The Interactive Airport Delay Visualization is a free dashboard that is continuously updated from live FAA data. This browser-based application allows users to intuitively filter by region, state, airport, delay status and delay type, and displays multiple simultaneous results. This is a free interactive dashboard from InetSoft, an innovator in dashboards, reporting and mashups...
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Data Mashups Instead of OLAP Cubes - There are data visualization technologies that are a lot easier to use than they were three-four years ago. So it all seems to be moving in that direction of empowering the end user to mix and match data sets. But it seems to me that ideally the beauty of a mashup environment, if it is done properly, is that you can essentially, I don't want to say circumvent IT, but you can avoid a lot of the painstaking work required for building specific OLAP cubes. Is that a fair assessment...
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Read what InetSoft customers and partners have said about their selection of Style Report as their production reporting tool. |
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End-users Need Data Mashup - Can't IT just set up all of the data relationships that end-users need ahead of time? These are natural questions to ask before embarking on a BI implementation project. But organizations already in the throes of this process certainly realize the difficulty of this task. No one can ever fully anticipate all the needs that users may have for enterprise data. End-users have a hard enough time documenting needs that they currently know about. During the planning stage, one is fortunate to be able to ascertain even a small measure of what is needed or desired in terms of data and its manipulation...
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Read what InetSoft customers and partners have said about their selection of Style Scope for their solution for dashboard reporting. |
Examples of the Uses of Integrated Geographic and Business Intelligence - Now let's run through a few examples of the typical uses of integrated geographic and business intelligence that we are starting to see emerge. One of the most common cases is market analysis, understanding your customers, where they are and what are their needs. Although a lot of the language we use here is found more commonly in the commercial sector, the public sector agencies also do similar things with census data. For instance some counties have taken census and mosaic data and used that information to model decisions such as planned location of community centers, walk-in centers, libraries, et cetera, based on the demographic data and based on people's preferences...
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Read how InetSoft saves money and resources with deployment flexibility. |
GIS and BI Complementary Approaches - GIS and BI each brings a complementary approach to the other. The geographic approach to business intelligence enables geography to be a new means of organizing data. Location can relate disparate data in ways other traditional techniques have difficulty doing. Similarly business intelligence brings an industrial strength reporting environment to GIS. So those are the conceptual reasons why it's a good idea to mash up these two technologies, if you will...
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More Business Intelligence Technology Information - This is a continuation of the table of contents of relevant product information about, and reasons for evaluating, InetSoft's business intelligence application for dashboards, reporting, and visual analysis: Best Usage of Business Intelligence - What are the steps to being a best user of business intelligence software? The first step has to do with collecting and preparing data for use in a BI application. This has to do with data management, aggregation of data from the numerous disparate data sources they may have, how they are transforming and cleansing that data...
Nice Interactive Visualization Gallery - Click on an image to demo an interactive visualization. These interactive dashboards allow you to get a feel for how easy it to use InetSoft's visualization software...
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Progression From Ad Hoc Query - "Data mashup is the next logical progression from ad hoc query," states Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft. "It removes the frustration that end-users have experienced when trying to manipulate data beyond what the standard ad hoc query tools provide. InetSoft's Style Intelligence software platform is the only business intelligence application to enable this ultimate level of self-service."
ROI with Data Mashup - What kinds of ROI can be expected with a data mashup project? It really depends on the kind of project where data mashup or data virtualization is being implemented. Typically if you are talking about it at a project level, and I am going to take the example of a BI or a reporting project. The ROI is very much based on the time that it would take for you to take a more waterfall approach to the BI or reporting project or customer intelligence project where you are gathering a lot of the requirements, getting the data model for it exactly right for creating this virtualization or data model. Then you are start your ETL programmers working to extract all the information. Then you start the reporting development...
Show a Client Scorecard Example - InetSoft's comprehensive real-time analytical reporting and dashboard software provides users with client scorecards that serve to monitor, measure, and manage performance by tracking metrics in real-time. View the example below to learn more about the Style Intelligence solution. Scorecarding is a proven approach for monitoring, measuring and managing performance by tracking metrics. A scorecard is a list of key performance indicators (KPIs), or metrics, that present current performance data for a business process or strategy against goals, quotas, and target trends...
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Read why choosing InetSoft's cloud-flexible BI provides advantages over other BI options. |
Showing the Creation of Data Mashups - Let me just segue into demonstrating the creation of data mashups. We will come back to the dashboard side of things. So we use the same BI tool, still in the browser. The right-hand mashup development canvas looks the same, but the left-hand side is little bit different. Here are the actual atomic data sources that have been set up by IT. So IT defines, for instance, this connection to a database. This could be any relational database, many of the common OLAP servers, a Web service, or some of the popular ERP applications like SAP or JD Edwards...
Talk About Canned Reporting - Typically this is the way organizations start with some sort of business intelligence initiative. It begins with canned reporting. This could be a sales report, or it could be regular financial statements. Reports are really designed to answer a specific question or maybe a set of specific questions. Some of you may have experienced reporting packages like Crystal Reports. You might already understand the value of pure reporting; really just getting information in a pixel perfect format to your end user to answer those questions. However, there are situations when a canned report falls short of what you need...
Talking About Data Mashups and Governance - let's actually talk about that because if Jim were here, he'd ring his metadata bell since he's always talking about that. Especially when you're trying to work with many different data sets, and there's the security angle here and there is also a data quality or data governance angle to this as well. But if you start talking about meta data, it really is important that you manage these definitions well because otherwise you start mixing and matching apples and oranges, and that cause all kinds of problems...
Using a Heat Map Visualization - Now the manager clicks on the spike in the bar chart and the map on the right hand side updates to show that town with crime reports marked on the map using a heat map visualization. The hot red shows the problem areas. Also depicted on the map are the locations of youth services such as clubs. At first glance it seemed that in the areas not affected by juvenile crime, there are a scattering of youth services. Within the problem area, there are already a number of youth organizations. At first glance, it doesn't appear that the number of youth service locations is a key issue...
What the End-user Can Do with Our BI Application - First, I am going to walk through what the end-user can do with our BI application, and so I will show a bunch of pre-built interactive dashboard examples. Then I will segue a little bit into the self-service BI capabilities, showing both data mashup and the interactive visualizations that again we are putting in the hands of the end-users...
Why the Business Needs Data Mashup - This article discusses the case for giving more power to end-users of business intelligence applications to create their own data mashups. InetSoft offers a unique capability in its BI platform for enabling end-users to combine disparate data sources that are not already mapped within a data warehouse schema. While traditional information management philosophy requires IT to be the gatekeeper...
Why Is Data Mashup Important? Data mash-up is another concept that I think is really very important and I think that this is certainly a new trend: this ability to avoid what I call the "duct tape" of Business Intelligence. And unfortunately many of us are still using Excel for a lot of our analytics. We have these PAT spreadsheets that do certain computations or mash-up information from one sheet to another and have all these wonderful macros in it. But the problem is that we are doing analytics in an area where we don't have the power that we truly need and we have spend an awful lot of money on these wonderful analytic platforms but we are not integrating Excel with that or data from other sources for that matter...