La fenêtre

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Open Data will completely change businesses

As part of a consortium led by ANR in 2008,aiming at studying businesses reactivity to virtual worlds, faberNovel decided to create a connection between virtual and real in businesses, and brainstormed on the question of data processing of a company’s activities. Le Fenêtre is an internal project, resulting from these thoughts.

faberNovel’s work

In order to serve ANR’s goal, faberNovel built a dashboard aggregating several real-time activity indicators.

The vision was to set aside traditional reporting tools, find new relevant data to measure and new way of displaying it. We were aware that the data display also had to be concrete enough to be understandable.

To build La fenêtre, faberNovel converted its strong convictions about data visualization into a rigorous methodology aiming at building a useful and user-friendly product. This methodology consisted in:

An upstream analysis to answer the following questions:

• What should La Fenêtre communicate? The answers were: Activities, effervescence, creativity,emotion indicators, interactivity.
• What can we measure?What data is available in businesses? The goal was to study if the project was feasible.
• What is relevant to display? What kind of information could be useful for visitors and collaborators to reach the goals set?

Data processing:

• Data gathering, not only what is available on the web (twitter, number of visits,…), but also data on management tools of the company (analysis of mails sent, blog posts, meeting rooms booking,…), and also non-“2.0” data, e.g. real-time electricity or coffee consumption.
• Making this data displayable
• Real time management of data updates

Information design was also a key step:

A lot of work was committed to decision making for the model and the display of indicators. The goal was to ensure the interface was easily readable and the whole experience was consistent. One had to grasp both a low (activity indicator) and high-level vision of the company’s activity.

Results

Since March 2010, La fenêtre is displayed on a wide screen in the lobby of faberNovel.

Visitors and collaborators are really enthusiastic as they can grasp the activity of the firm in one second, and see how lively it is.

A time-lapse video of la Fenetre was made and shows how dynamic the firm is, and allows to understand the company in an unexpected way. This is the potential behind this data visualization: find trends and correlations and take the pulse of the company.