I have been toying with the idea of how Google Docs could be used as a Business Intelligence platform for small businesses. As the thought develops it is expanding from just Google Docs to Google as a platform which could include Google for your domain, Google Gears, Google Gadgets, Google Charts and maybe more. I am hoping to prove the concept with a project for our retails stores our retails stores. The goal is for a daily push of our key metrics to a Google Spreadsheet. The key metrics would then be reported on using some sort of Dashboard.
BI dashboards are a metaphor based on the dashboard in your car. Wikipedia describes car dashboards as something that “contains instrumentation and controls pertaining to operation of the vehicle”. Wikipedia also touches on BI dashboards: “Based on the metaphor of the instrument panel in a car, the computer, or “digital” version of a dashboard provides a business manager with the input necessary to “drive” the business. Devices such as red/green/yellow lights, alerts, drill-downs, summaries, graphics such as bar charts, pie charts, bullet graphs, sparklines and gauges are usually set in a portal-like environment that is often role-driven and customizable.” The Mac OSX dashboard typically doesn’t fall into the same category, but I am finding it a great way to get a quick glance at the information I need.
Coincidentally all of the partners in our stores are using Mac laptops. There is a tool for displaying Google Gadgets as OSX Dashboard Widgets. By automating a process to send key metrics from our Point of Sale system to a Google spreadsheet I will be able to create a Google Gadget that pulls calculated cells from that spreadsheet into the Gadget using JSON. The Google Charts API will allow me to create charts from the JSON information as well. My hope is that I can drop a couple of Widgets onto our dashboards and all of the partners will be able to hit F12 and see recent sales numbers, current trends, inventory levels, etc. The best part is that there is no expensive software to purchase and maintain. The only custom code will be a little Javascript in the Google Gadget and a Ruby script that parses information from the POS and sends it to Google via an Atom call. I could probably create OSX Widgets without creating Google Gadgets, but using Google Gadgets will also allow us to have the same information on a Google for your domain start page.
4 Comments
I think you’re on to something. Be careful about running up against limits in Google Apps (not sure if the limits are published somewhere). Gruber hit the wall using the forms feature with Google Spreadsheets: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/february#thu-07-survey_update.
Also, I’ve found Google’s email for domains to be very spotty — it rejects a substantial number of well-formed emails from people trying to contact you as if your email address doesn’t exist.
Thanks for the heads up on the number of rows problem that Gruber came up against. As for the email, I will almost take any help I can get in reducing the number of unread emails in my inbox.
The larger problem with using Google Apps for domains is the domain management. Once you start letting Google handle some of the DNS, your about forced into using their email for that domain as it breaks the default email forwarding. I wouldn’t mind this so much if their email routing wasn’t to recalcitrant. Even Facebook can’t deliver emails to my Google Apps managed domains. Not good at all for customer-facing solutions. And the Google knowledgebase articles are very helpful — they blame the sender’s email server being configured incorrectly and ask you to forward long email headers (if I was getting the emails, I’d have the headers, but then I wouldn’t have an issue).
The gadget writing side of that equation is even easier… just use Gadgets-in-Docs…
The Google Visualiaztion API gives a simple way to get spreadsheet data into a gadget which can start life embedded in your spreadsheet (look at the chart icon’s “gadget…” picker for some examples) and then, once it is linked to the range you want to monitor, you can syndicate that gadget to iGoogle or another page (as an iframe or published page)…
Check out code.google.com/apis/visualization and from the developers guide page, follow the links which describe the gadget methods…