Dashboards and Usage Analytics

Business managers use key performance indices, or KPIs to measure the health of the business. Web marketer’s measure everything, page views, button clicks, unique visitors.

With large numbers of transactions, a single data point doesn’t reveal much, but when aggregated trends emerge helping them make decisions and navigate their respective disciplines.

I wondered what types of things CAD managers could measure that might reveal trends and help guide their decisions.

Here are some possible examples,

If you knew which CAD Add-ins were being used, how often they were used, and how each change over time could this be valuable? In this case, knowing that no one has started a certain add-in for more than six months would likely make you question whether or not you need to be paying for licenses.

If you have delivered a new workspace, would it help to know what percentage of users were using the new workspace? Adoption rates can help with allocation of support resources, and it can indicate where additional training is needed to help users transition to the new environment.

If you are an organization that allows your consultants to use their favorite CAD application, would it help to know the percentage of users, or even total users using one versus the other software? Among other things, this knowledge might help you understand what future budgets will look like.

To accomplish this, we need to identify which programs are being tracked and add a little bit of code to each in order to send the usage record back to a database.

This type of data, especially if tracked over time, is well suited for a dashboard allowing for quick comparisons and visualization of trends.