LUCRUM powers the new Cleveland Museum of Art website
May 24, 2010
This snapshot shows the new home page for the Cleveland Museum of Art, featuring personalized content, exhibitions information, and highlighted objects from the collection.
It’s a treat when we have the opportunity to publicly showcase work from our portfolio. This week, we invite you to view the results of our most recent assignment with the Cleveland Museum of Art and their new website.
This event marks the successful completion of a two year effort to set a new standard for how museums engage with their visitors. The engagement has followed the LUCRUM iStream methodology – starting with our high-value Stakeholder Alignment Session, though a process of analysis, collaboration, transformation, and now launch – to result in this groundbreaking experience. The website was developed in partnership with the museum staff and award-winning Pentagram Design, based in New York.
One of the most compelling features of the new website is enhanced access to the museum’s encyclopedic collection of over 40,000 objects - many of these iconic works of art are now accessible online, as well as woven into the pages of the site. The objects become part of the fabric of the experience. Large images and a wide range of search options make it easy to wander for hours in the online collection – I encourage you to give it a try!
The redesigned collections browser offers visual access to over 40,000 objects in the Museum's collection.
You’ll not find a single security guard with arms crossed, daring you to approach for a close-up look. Interaction is encouraged, and you are invited to add comments to their favorite objects or tag them with key words so that they are easier for others to find.
The new site also paves the way for more in the way of multimedia features, to provide diverse perspectives on individual works of art and offer behind-the-scenes views of areas within the museum that are not accessible to the general public.
In planning the experience, the design and development teams examined the best online practices of retail and consumer product brands. Social media is heavily integrated into each page of the new site as well, with an option to share content with various online services or add events to a personal calendar. Links are also supplied to the museum’s own Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts.
The simplicity of the navigation was also a key to improving the overall experience for site users. Everything on the site is as close to the homepage as possible, which eliminates the kind of multiple clicks and top-down hierarchical navigation found on a lot of websites. An expanded calendar provides day-by-day views of all activities at the museum, with direct links to more information about the events or to the online box office.
LUCRUM engineered the site using a number of advanced technologies and design innovations. And while the end experience is highly visual and is delivered in an engaging, interactive way, the some of the real marvels are “under the hood.” Think about it – the key to the site’s richness is in the data that it makes available, and the way in which you can engage with that data to find “hidden meaning” and value that was not immeditately obvious.
Sound familiar? The same data strategies and fundamental approaches we use in our business intelligence assignments apply here too. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking more about how we applied these principles and how they lead to successful technology projects. In the meantime, take a moment to enjoy the website, and let us know what you think!
-Eric
Visualization: Rules for BI
May 13, 2010
“In God we trust; all others must bring data.”
- W. Edwards Deming
At our BI Symposium on May 6, 2010, Jeff Shaffer provided us with great insight on how the way we present our data can be just as important as what we present. Jeff is not a big fan of pie charts. In fact he has 4 rules:
- Don’t use pie charts.
- If you use pie charts, be careful in chosing the number of items you chart.
- If you use pie charts, be sure they are “centered at noon”.
- If you use pie charts, make sure that they sum to 100%
Jeff shared lots of bad charts, lots of REALLY BAD charts and summed it up with some great looking dashboards. I encourage you to check out his presentation!
- Jodie
Creating the BI Roadmap
May 12, 2010
Last Thursday, May 6, 2010 at our BI Symposium, we brought together 4 BI Leaders to discuss BI success and failure and share their ideas for making BI Better. Steve Hangen and Dennis Brown shared their story with us. Steve and Dennis have brought BI to WinWholesale using the Microsoft tools that they already had on-site. Using MS SharePoint, SQL Server and Reporting Services, Steve and Dennis have created an easy-to-use system that brought $2M of margin improvement in the first 3 months of the tools’ release.
We were Tweeting during the event. Here are the nuggets of info we learned from Steve and Dennis:
Not all of their slides could be shared due to the confidential nature of some of the dashboards, but here is the rest of their presentation.
Enjoy!
- Jodie
Simplicity and Transparency
May 11, 2010
Last Thursday we had a great turnout for our first ever BI Symposium. Our host was the NKU METS Center. If you never been, you should check it out! It’s a wonderful facility! It’s truly state-of-the-art!
Our first speaker of the day was Dr. David Holcomb. David really set the tone well with his presentation on Simplicity and Transparency. Do you think of data as an asset? If so, treat it like the rest of your assets:
- Acquire it
- Prepare it
- Deploy it
- Manage it
So many times, we skip (or underfund) the “manage” step or at worse, skip all 4 steps and keep the data hidden from the organization.
David’s presentation can be found below. Enjoy!
– Jodie
BI Syposium TOMORROW!
May 5, 2010
We hope to see you tomorrow at our event. If you go and use Twitter, please use #BISymp2010 to mark the event in your posts.
Headed to our event? Click on the Marker below and enter your address to get directions.
3861 Olympic Boulevard
Erlanger, KY 41018
Join us on Thursday, May 6, 2010 at the NKU METS Center for a half-day symposium of collaborative learning, focused on business intelligence. The Business Intelligence Symposium brings together regional business & IT executives to learn how their peers have been implementing data analytics, business intelligence solutions and Dashboarding. The emphasis of the symposium is to share ideas, stories, experiences, and business cards. Case studies, along with live demonstrations will be presented. Breakfast and lunch will be provided in a collaborative environment that facilitates peer networking and BI discussions for an enhanced learning experience.
Agenda:
7:30am – 8:00am Registration and Breakfast
8:00am – 9:00am - Director, Data Management, Western Union
Simplicity and Transparency – How to do Effective Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence (Presentation)
9:00am -9:45am Mr. Steve Hangen – CIO, WinWholesale
BI Roadmap – A Project, a Journey, a Culture (Presentation and Demo)
9:45am -10:00am Coffee Break & Conversations
10:00am – 10:45am Mr. John R. Ward – Director, Health Systems Integration, TriHealth
The New Era of Healthcare Clinical Information Systems Unstructured Data – Internal/External
10:45am –11:30am Mr. Jeff Shaffer - Vice President of Legal Operations, Unifund
Visualization – Running a business with Dashboards and Scorecards (Presentation and live Demo)
11:30am – 1:00pm Lunch /Panel Discussion led by Dr. David Holcomb and guest speakers
For more information please call Sheila at (513) 241-5949 x.215
BI and Software-As-A-Service (BI SaaS)
May 3, 2010
Who moved my cheese…again???
Economy challenges always seem to prompt new business models and productivity increases. Remember 10 years ago and the dot.com bomb?? Prior to 1999, websites were being developed in great numbers but there was no revenue model to support it. Those companies failed…others, that found a way to take a seemingly free service and get paid for it thrived. Additionally, with the fall off in the economy, people had to find a way to deliver the same services their customers were used to but do it for less. Voila! Off-shore resources!!
In the last several years though, even off-shore resources are expensive. Seasoned IT professionals (baby boomers) are retiring and taking valuable company info along with them. Profit margins for most companies continue to erode as spending has slowed. DASD has gotten significantly less expensive and bandwidth has quadrupled (or more?)! Those “free” websites now charge fees, but they aren’t outrageous. Given these changes, it makes sense that more and more applications are moving into the Cloud.
As you know, here at LUCRUM, “we do BI”. Respoinding to our customers, we implemented Agile BI concepts long before it was fashionable. We are able to get BI projects up and running in significantly less time than our “big 6″ competitors (and do it for less!). As we continue to investigate ways to get data to our customers faster, we have become fascinated with the Cloud. Certainly there has to be a way to take all of these company assets, secure them in the Cloud and give users better/faster access to their data.
We’ve investigated a few companies that are doing this today: Good Data, OCO, BIRST, and PivotLink. What’s interesting about each of these companies is that they’ve taken the common business problems – Sales and Finance – and created models to support them. I was fortunate to participate in a meeting with Good Data last week. I’m excited to learn more about each of these companies and even more excited to see how LUCRUM can support BI in the Cloud!
Stay tuned!
- Jodie
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