iPad for Enterprise Developer

Here's the primary reason I'm waiting for an iPad to come out:

This is just a concept that I had in my mind for a few months already. No real data, or systems represented, just some mocking with the graphical editor and PSD files by teehan+lax.

Basically that's a dashboard with an overview status of the entire organization infrastructure. With it one would need just a single look to see, how the subsystems are behaving and what needs attention. Microsoft Visio 2010 could be used to render data graphics into such an image (or this could be done directly with some C# code), which then gets published to the web and checked upon by an iPad browser (with 5 sec refresh). Actual status links and icons could be made clickable (image maps) leading you into the drill-down reports of the corresponding subsystem.

Obviously, in order to create such an overview report you would need some sort of Maintenance and Monitoring Enterprise infrastructure enhanced with active data query capabilities and some processing engine.

I'm currently using an extremely limited variation of such a dashboard, running as a desktop application. It is limited by the UI and data retrieval capabilities. Yet, such enterprise dashboard already helps a lot to feel and understand, how the complex system behaves and evolves over the time.

An enterprise could have a number of such dashboards, each slicing into a different aspect of an organization:

• infrastructure;
• finances;
• customers;
• resources;
• etc

In a sense these dashboards are like the NUnit representation of the current state of the enterprise, where each indicator represents state of a subsystem, captured by the monitoring and evaluated by some business rule, KPI or any other type of the applied business intelligence. Once composed, they form the big picture that is worth thousands of words.

Wouldn't you want to have such an overview of your system on an iPad, that you can carry around just like folks from the StarTrek?

PS: since the background image is just an ordinary image, overlayed with status data, you could ask your fellow designer to make it look as cool as you want.

Comments

[Dmitri Nesteruk]

What about mobility? One of the advantages of mobile dashboards is they can be connected with, e.g., WiMAX, so that decision makers are always in control of their business. But iPad doesn't support this kind of tech, does it?

[Rinat Abdullin]

iPad has WiFi by default, since it aims to provide the best browsing experience. GSM (micro-SIM) is optional.

[Giorgio]

Note that a wireless picture frame does the same thing for $60-70. :)

[Rinat Abdullin]

I do not think picture frames support UI for drilling into the exception reports, checking out the dead messages or tuning the number of instances in the cloud application ))

[jpv]

Seems to be an interesting idea to present an erp