Forget Dashboards - Netvibes Gets $15 Million
Who needs a dashboard when you have Netvibes.
Posting on Silicon Beat, Matt Marshall announced that Netvibes raised $15 Million.
I think is is fantastic news. Netvibes provides the only type of “dashboard” 99% of enterprise users will ever need.
Matt goes on to say
Holy smokes, though: This is a lot of money for a company that hasn’t found a business model. It is one of the largest round of venture backing for a European Web 2.0 company.
I think Netvibes has a clear business model. In fact, I have been writing directly to the Netvibes team for months to ask them if I can buy an appliance version of their system to deploy within the enterprise.
As Enterprise Web 2.0 takes off, managers are going to have a hard time keeping track of all the People Blogs, Project Blogs, Client Blogs, Product Blogs, Expert Blogs and Vendor Blogs that will inevitably crop up. And that only represents the internal enterprise blogs.
Recently, I have seen a few articles on “dashboards”. Usually these articles are written by someone who has never worked in a large organization.
For example, Avenue A | Razorfish recently released an interesting Best Practices report. It is certainly worth a read.
They make a good case for Enterprise Blogs and Enterprise Wikis.
However, Avenue A | Razorfish has gone off the deep end with their call for enterprise dashboards.
I think they imagine enterprise life being something like a cross between Star Trek and a Six-Sigma Widget factory.
In reality, very very few knowledge workers make decisions all day long. Instead, they create content, consensus and information. Traders might need dash boards to know what is going on in the market, but the marketing department does not need 500 updates a day on fashion tends to come up with their next campaign.
Instead, knowledge workers need news. They need to communicate. They need words:
- Project A - Had client update - one critical issue
- Project B - Signed engagement ltr - start next week
- Project C - Meeting set for next week
That dashboard isn’t a dashboard at all - is a news reader.
And, Netvibes is exactly the kind of enterprise news reader that knowledge workers need.
Thanks for your insights comparing dashboards to Netvibes. You made good points about the functionality of Netvibes as a kind of enterprise news reader. And you’re definitely right about too much information being a detriment rather than an advantage. Research from which the report was based shows that 40% of Fortune 2000 companies have digital dashboards. Some have even gone so far as to call dashboards the “ultimate CEO killer application”. It obviously should not be construed as the panacea, but as you’ve alluded to, that it provides timely and customized information. For digital dashboards, it goes further in that they are also specific to a rather small audience, mostly executives. This latter point probably diverges from NetVibes. I.e. being that portals are based off of the enterprise BI software integrated with the portal environment and with critical ETL tools to aggregate highly sensitive and disparate data. I find the 8 dimensions comparing each stage helpful in this regard. A recent Business Finance magazine presents an insightful case on the critical aspects of adopting dashboards (summarized here: http://www.theworkplaceblog.com/2006/07/warming_up_to_performance_dash_1.html ). Thanks again for your thoughts on the report. Discussions can also be furthered via the online version of this report. (see http://www.theworkplaceblog.com/2006/08/practicing_what_we_preach_an_i.html )