The Death of Flash SAP XCelsius was the Ford Fiesta of the BI industry. Inexpensive to run, simple to implement. Businesses could get dashboards up and running in days or hours. We’ve helped clients design over 1,000 XCelsius dashboards over time, so we know how practical and adaptable they were. But then the industry went and killed Flash. Old XCelsius dashboards, which worked perfectly well last month and posed no threat to anyone’s IT security, are now downloaded and treated as high-risk by browsers, or blocked outright.
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Happy New Year to one and all! As data scientists/analysts/researchers/programmers/anything else on that crazy data science Venn diagram, I’m assuming all of our new years resolutions involve visualising our data with more sophistication and finesse. So with that in mind, I thought it was high time for a post about the joys of modularizing your shiny app code.

New Year, new improved workflows with emphasis on efficiency & reproducibility, amiright?
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Synopsis Market Research is great at compiling the right data, but not so good at making it easy to use. This isn’t about “storytelling”. It’s about the data itself, and clarity on what delivering it actually means. Getting the data out of siloes like tabs and SPSS where it cannot adequately be mined, and out into the big wide world as Tidy Data.
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Digging into some electoral data The 2017 election is hardly interesting, from a data perspective. We all know the map will be mostly blue with some red blobs and a yellow top. Like Maggie Simpson, as the Radio Times pointed out… It’s often the same with research and data we use for business. Research teams carefully construct management reports each month but when little changes, not much attention is paid. Considering how much we paid for the data, or how much is traded on it, that feels like a missed opportunity.
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