Switchbox is excited to announce the launch on Skinny Ohio.  We had a great time modernizing this site for the Auditor of State in collaboration with Conrad Phillips Vutech.  The new Skinny Ohio boasts a slick user interface, responsive design, and custom CMS built on Dot Net Nuke framework.   

If you’re running a successful business you’re probably looking at some important numbers on a weekly or monthly basis.  While there are a number of names for these number reporting systems (Scorecard, Critical Numbers, KPI’s) most of our clients call them a Dashboard.  We’ve helped a lot of clients automate these over the years so we wanted to share a few common problems that clients develop when they use a company dashboard along with a few quick ideas to make them easier and more beneficial to use.

Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto has quickly become a business classic.  If you haven’t read it an oversimplification of the book is that using a checklist massively increases quality and accuracy and prevents errors.  He works through how checklists allow skyscrapers to be built in months with a failure rate of nearly zero.  How pilots used checklists to make routine tasks like takeoffs become safer, and ultimately how they help in his industry, medicine.  

Do you find yourself feeling overwhelmed with the amount of information that is given to you each day? Or how about struggling to meet with different members of your office to reach a specific goal or quota? Then we need to talk. About your diet. No, not what you eat (go ahead and have that donut, we won’t tell) but the low information diet. 

The largest challenge with building dashboards and custom reporting is not getting the information.  It’s about taking the wealth of information and making it meaningful.  Find out why miles per gallon, megabytes, and calories are completely irrelevant to your life.

We are probably going to make a lot of IT departments mad by publishing this but we think it’s an important subject to discuss.  “Shadow-IT” often has a very negative connotation and with all the press on vendors doing really stupid things that ultimately exposed companies like Target to cyber attacks we understand why.  However, Shadow-IT does not have to be dangerous and in many cases it’s needed to get the job done at large organizations.  If you follow a few simple guidelines you can have security and a successful project without the hassles many IT projects face.

As more and more companies start to build web enabled dashboards there are a lot of considerations in just how they look.  It’s not just about color anymore.  Concerns range from how far from how high off the ground will the screen be, will it be accessible on a phone, and do you need to have a print version are all important considerations.

Every company struggles with backlogged projects.  There are always too many projects and too little time.  The problem is that a lot of backlogged projects are important and are time sensitive but they get delayed (often indefinitely) because companies don’t have a way to prioritize them.  

Switchbox Inc and local design firm, JP Design, collaborated on an exciting project for LightbulbU.com. Working to advance LightbulbU’s potential for online sales, the new brand/website package was designed as a robust e-commerce portal with an ongoing potential to better educate consumers in the energy efficiency of their lighting choices.

ETP Resources is a uniquely positioned company in the Exchange Traded Products (commonly referred to as Exchange Traded Funds) industry.  Switchbox worked closely with the founder Jim Simpson to create a secure online repository for data that gets updated daily, bundled together for customers unique needs and ultimately sold to them via one time download […]