A Need for a Dashboard

The Colorado Department of State BIC is capable of offering more to the Colorado business community than raw data, public data workshops, and GoCode Colorado. The BIC takes things another step further by improving access to insights that public data provides for a non-technical audience. Xentity provided design work for a transformative and innovative dashboard for the CDOS BIC. The overall task was building out a dashboard, maintaining and creating the update cycle, hosting on AWS, and embedding where possible on the state website.

Designing an Accessible Dashboard for the Public

CDOS BIC required a publicly transparent, accessible, and simple PowerBI-based dashboard for business decision maker shareholders. The BIC needs dashboards because not all members of the public are adept at downloading and analyzing data, especially through an API endpoint. Not all members of the public desire to regularly download more data to keep track of and re-analyze. By publishing a dashboard, the public can review data trends at their own pace and stay up to date with less work than if they maintained the data on their own.

Xentity achieved the completion of several activities, including:

  • Discovering a backlog of specific metrics desired.
  • Defining the source to extract from, transform and ways to load.
  • Design the front-end and access requirements.
  • Establish a development environment.
  • Prototype one end-to-end metric to assure the environment works.
  • Prioritize the 5-15 metrics against budget constraints.
  • Develop the ETL (extract, transform, and load).
  • Also, develop Feedback form capability.
  • Furthermore, develop 5-15 low/medium effort widgets/visualizations.
  • Implement Transfer to Production Environment with BIC.
  • Document Architecture, Environment and development steps.

Development Can Now Proceed

Through Xentity’s design efforts, all activities were completed, allowing the development process to proceed. This will allow a PowerBI-based dashboard to be released. Thus, allowing a public dashboard that allows the public to review data trends at their own pace with less work in the process. An innovative project that Xentity was more than happy to be a part of.

Updates – CO BI Center (BIC) GoCode, 2022

Xentity is continuing to provide data management and technical support for the Business Intelligence Center (BIC) and its GoCode Colorado (GoCode.co) challenge throughout the year 2022.