Thanks to the hard work of our own staff and the generous contributions of our loyal customers, Dimensional Insight was able to host yet another successful Dimensional Insight Users Conference (DIUC) this past week. Featuring valuable insights from a panel consisting of Dimensional Insight’s co-founder and CEO Fred Powers and other technology heads, this year’s keynote provided us with some insight into the current state and future of the company’s growing technologies. Here are some of the notable takeaways we learned from this year’s discussion.
Navigating together through uncertain times
Although every passing year presents new obstacles and opportunities, the onset of COVID-19 led to a particularly confusing and complicated year and a half. As we take steps to move forward from the pandemic and adjust to the new normal, we collectively have to ask ourselves, “where are we headed?” To know our path forward, we have to understand our current position and the position we want to get to – and forge a map for getting us there. For Dimensional Insight, this path consists of three key criteria:
- Increasing our client’s return on investment
- Developing and advancing powerful technology
- Implementing more adoption throughout our client’s organizations
The onset of the pandemic saw no shortage of brand new and captivating technologies, but the priorities of our clients haven’t changed. While others are focused on selling what’s hot and what’s new, Dimensional Insight is still focused on building something that makes a difference for our customers. Every company has constraints, many of which exacerbated by the pandemic, and that’s why Dimensional Insight is committed to helping organizations make the most of their resources and maximize their return on investment. By focusing on the top 30% of technologies that our clients use most, Dimensional Insight can focus on innovating and delivering a world-class product.
As we look to the future, Dimensional Insight is investing more to ensure that our product is getting in the right hands. But increased adoption requires a strong foundation of functional and powerful technology, which we’ve outlined below with some of our more recent innovations.
Architecture and data management
Dimensional Insight’s priority with all our technologies is providing expert integration between data sources, applications, and organizations. Our new Spectre engine, combined with cBase, the latest columnar database technology, delivers robust business intelligence for information analysts, managers, and consumers. Designed from the ground up to optimize performance and taking advantage of the latest innovations in hardware and advanced compiler technology, Spectre provides some key benefits:
- Designed for in-memory use
- Built for development speed and faster user response time
- No dimension limits
- Columnar design improves response time when performing complex queries
- Improved calc engine returns complex analytics functions in seconds or less
Business rules
Dimensional Insight’s Measure Factory is the center of your automated workflow, allowing you to dig into your data at the deepest levels by helping you define calculations and providing a way for others to understand your results. In addition to providing integrated data governance via definition collaboration and a mechanism for producing critical KPIs, the Measure Factory also features a self-service dashboard creation toolkit.
Data science
It’s easy to get lost in a sea of data, and even experienced analysts don’t always know where to start diving into the data. That’s why Dimensional Insight provides their users with assisted analytics that help you save time hunting for valuable insights, quickly identify the most important data, and discover opportunities for performance improvement. Dimensional Insight also provides seamless integration of the ‘R’ programming language within the DI Workbench. R allows its user to execute in real time, analyze seasonal trends, and perform predictive analytics, all with a complete toolbox of data science libraries.
Business intelligence
Enabling fact-based decision making requires a strong business intelligence infrastructure that provides you with easy-to-access and actionable insights. To ensure that our clients always have the data they need, Dimensional Insight has made some significant advances in our visualization and reporting tools.
Dimensional Insight’s new Springboard application was developed to provide our clients with the means to achieve next generation reporting. Springboard’s powerful and dynamic layout system allows users to combine text, table, image, and chart content, all while being contained entirely in Dimensional Insight’s DivePort.
In a similar vein, Dimensional Insight has come a long way with our Stamp Variation System. DivePort’s Self Service stamps are highly customizable, and now include more options than ever before to enable users across your entire organization. Additionally, instead of stamps requiring separate files for each customization, Dimensional Insight now provides a single stamp file with customizations built in.
To pull the visual experience all together, Dimensional Insight has updated the Dimensional Insight User Experience (DIUX) Toolkit. You can have the best data in the world, but that data means little if users struggle to obtain value from it due to usability obstacles. DIUX helps you to create easy-to-use and visually stunning dashboards, resulting in greater adoption of data analytics and leading to an increased return on investment. DIUX is available in all standard DI Applications and as a toolkit for custom applications.
Diver gateway
Access your data whenever and wherever you want it with Dimensional Insight’s Diver Gateway. Diver Gateway makes it even easier to gain the insights necessary to grow your business by unifying your analytics and applications data. Available as both a browser and executable, Gateway can be implemented through DiveTab (Windows, iPad, iPhone), DivePort (Windows, iPad), and ProDiver (Windows only). Some of Gateway’s key benefits include:
- Access to the data when you need on the device of your choosing
- No need for multiple clients for different functionality
- Low cost of ownership
- The data quality, governance, and automation benefits of Measure Factory
- Reduced development time
- Customizable dashboards
- Universal dashboard access between devices
- No more lost productivity due to bad network connections (Gateway can be accessed online or offline)
Cloud and security
To ensure that our customers can implement a cloud strategy that best suits their needs, Dimensional Insight provides a variety of flexible deployment options:
Dimensional Insight is also working towards replacing our SAML authentication with multifactor authentication and extending OpenID Connect (OAuth 2.0) to all deployment options and all client applications.
Migration
Dimensional Insight is always committed to ensuring that the user community is always able to migrate to the next version so that no customer is left behind. Migrating to version 7.1 of the Diver Platform provides numerous opportunities, including a ProDiver facelift, DIUX, Combined Measures & Diver Portlet, Gateway, DI-ODBC and a variety of new customization options in the Measure Factory. To ensure that our customers have access to Dimensional Insight’s newest innovations, Dimensional Insight has provided multiple ways to migrate to the most recent version: an “as-is” migration for Diver Solution 7.1, a “partial” migration for Diver Platform 7.1, and a “complete” migration that entails a total Spectre conversion.
Guiding principles
Dimensional Insight’s guiding vision has always been to provide expert data integration and to be a trusted partner by keeping our promises and developing unparalleled industry expertise. Our commitment to the success of our customers is encapsulated by our multiple awards for industry excellence:
- Scored 4.5 out of 5 stars in the 2021 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms Report
- Voted by our customers as an overall industry leader in the Dresner Advisory Services 2021 Industry Excellence Awards
- Voted as the Best in KLAS – Healthcare Business Intelligence & Analytics 2021 for the 3rd consecutive year in a row (and 8th overall)
Moving forward, Dimensional Insight intends to define our future direction by working towards a simplified analytics infrastructure, improving collaboration between stakeholders, and helping organizations develop an optimal, data-driven response to market changes in the way business is conducted.
Once again, we’d like to thank everybody who helped make this DIUC possible and look forward to seeing you next year.
