An Interview with the creator of Spotfire Mobile Metrics, Patrick Husting

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Patrick Husting, the VP of TIBCO Spotfire and creator of Spotfire Mobile Metrics  is “a software junkie. I’m a developer at heart and I like creating things.”

After pursuing a lucrative career in technology focusing on analytics and business intelligence to help executives get more out of their data for over 8 years, Patrick took his earnings and created something new: a platform that gives the “BI dashboard” a completely new twist by going mobile, making it personal, and giving a readout of what’s going on with the business all at once. This idea of “personalized business intelligence” is  what’s behind the Spotfire Mobile Metrics platform.

In my recent interview with Patrick (which you can watch above), he described the concepts behind Spotfire Mobile Metrics, using real-world analogies with personal fitness devices and the data output they offer.

Spotfire Mobile Metrics on a Windows 8 display

TIBCO Spotfire Mobile Metrics showing KPIs on a tablet display from an interview with Patrick Husting

Patrick says the best way to understand the personalized Business Intelligence that Spotfire Mobile Metrics provides is to view the charts and graphics that show the state of our health based on a few key indicators, and then realize that we can focus on KPIs that indicate the health of a business, and put them front and center in a mobile-friendly interface in the same way. This quick view typically will rely on just a handful of KPIs at most, which can be prioritized and made as prominent as putting them into tiles in a Windows 8 home screen.

Building the set of business rules that produce each simple graph can include color-based warning indicators, and work off data that can be drawn from both internal sources or external, historic or in realtime.

He was explicit in pointing out that this platform is not about taking all the dashboards and making them fit on a tablet, but rather considering what are the most important KPI’s, and putting them right up front and immediately visible.

It’s not a dashboard on the phone, it’s like a stock ticker.

Whereas the self-serve BI space is massive and growing as more web and desktop applications appear that allow end-users to create their own dashboards with less programming and database management expertise required, Patrick sees a serious downside to all of this capability. Patrick sees a business landscape where business analysts, middle management and others involved in decision making are spending (more likely wasting) their time starting from scratch over and over again to burrow through the data using the tools these self-serve BI platforms offer. Patrick says, he’d rather have his people doing something productive and “not chasing a rabbit down a hole” setting up their own unique dashboards and metric displays.

This is where he believes that the Spotfire Mobile Metrics platform gets to the heart of what’s important, by displaying metrics that are focused around the KPI’s that will determine success for the business.

He goes on to say that KPI’s are “smart” because they are:

  • focused on goals and strategies
  • known and measureable
  • have favorites, are actionable, have thresholds and alerts
  • are movers, are social, are related, are aware

If you’re interested in a demo of Spotfire Mobile Metrics you can sign up for a demo invitation at: http://spotfire.tibco.com/en/discover-spotfire/what-does-spotfire-do/mobile-kpis.aspx