He has narrowed it down to thirteen potential targets for readers to vote on in his poll, one of which is Salesforce.com, the leading SaaS enterprise cloud computing company. Coming under “Pricey Buys in Hot Markets”, I think Salesforce.com is probably a little out of Oracle’s reach at this point in time.

Opinions are divided judging by the comments the post has received: with names such as IBM, Google and Yahoo floating around, some are confident that Oracle has the power to capture the market’s biggest players. EMC is also a popular choice with the expectation that Oracle would take first place in the data storage business on top of NetApp, and despite not making Jannise’s list, NetApp also makes an appearance as a potential acquiree.

Personally I think Oracle are sitting comfortably on Sun Microsystems for their servers and storage activity so may choose to invest in another, weaker area as some other readers suggested, in order to provide a more complete technology stack. Having said that, they may equally wish to secure their place in the market by building on an already successful acquisition… We’ll just have to wait and see.

What do you think? Post your opinion as a comment, or take a look at Jannise’s poll.

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A dashboard or scorecard interface finally makes it easy for a majority of users to quickly find, analyze, and explore the information they need to perform their daily tasks.

There is a subtle distinction between a scorecard and dashboard. Each tool merges elements from the other, but at a high level they both target specific and different levels of the business decision making process.

At the highest, most strategic level of the decision making spectrum sit scorecards. Scorecards display periodic snapshots of performance associated with an organization’s strategic objectives and plans. The goal of the scorecard is to keep the business focused on a common strategic objective by making comparisons within your department, company and/or industry to indicate your direction. The primary measurement used in a scorecard is the key performance indicator. These key performance indicators are often a composite of several metrics or other KPIs that measure the organization’s ability to execute a strategic objective.

The common industry perception is that a dashboard displays information about a company at a given point in time that can be used to make better business decisions. Dashboards fall down one level from a scorecard in the decision making process; as they are less focused on a strategic objective and more tied to specific operational goals. An operational goal may contribute directly to one or more higher level strategic objectives. Within a dashboard, the execution of the operational goal itself becomes the focus, not the strategy. The purpose of a dashboard is to provide the user with actionable business information in a format that is both insightful and intuitive. Dashboards leverage their data primarily in the form of metrics and KPIs.

When we were doing our research, we stumbled across Dan Holowack’s blog. He provides us with a metaphorical solution to our problem that might help you better remember the differences between the two:

Imagine for a moment that you’re driving a car…

DASHBOARD

All the instruments in your center console are displaying current-state information. The speedometer says you’re traveling 45 km/h and the RPM gauge is at 3000. The odometer tracks and displays total distance traveled and a fuel gauge says you’re at half a tank. All these indicators display information for a ’single point in time’.

SCORECARD

Knowing all this dashboard information is great, but here’s why you need a scorecard… you’re heading straight for a BRICK WALL (10 seconds to impact). It’s fascinating how the dashboard can give you so much information, but it’s all quite useless without the support of Scorecards. Consider the Scorecard to be your own eyes. You notice you’re passing all the other drivers on the road and decide to slow down (for fear of a speeding ticket!). Similar to how you compare cars on the road, the Scorecard should make comparisons within your department, company and/or industry to indicate your direction (are you heading for a brick wall?).

Source: Dan Holowack, Love Data Intelligence blog

A nice little round-up for this post comes from TDWI : “Whereas a dashboard informs users what they are doing, a scorecard tells them how well they are doing. In other words, a dashboard records performance while a scorecard charts progress. In short, a dashboard is a performance monitoring system, whereas a scorecard is a performance management system.”

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Inspired by abduzeedo

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