InnoMetrics Dashboard: The Design, and Implementation of the Adaptable Dashboard for Energy-Efficient Applications Using Open Source Tools

Abstract

Increasing amount of data the organizations worldwide have at their disposal lead to the need to structure, organize and present the information obtained from it. That is because, in today’s rapid-changing business environment, managers and executives need to be able to gain crucial insights about the ongoing project in as little time as possible. Recently, energy efficiency has become a greater field of research, and companies started concentrating on monitoring energy-related metrics. In addition, many of them have built their own internal tools (dashboards) to do just this. However, one of the major drawbacks of building specialized tools is the lack of adaptability. That is, they are often tailored to only one person (e.g. CEO), or a small group of them (e.g. board of directors, managers). Furthermore, the combination of metrics that is displayed to them does not change over time. This is a problem because most likely there exists a better metric combination that would allow users to get the crucial insights faster. To fill this gap, our ongoing research focuses on making the dashboards adaptable to multiple roles within the organization while optimizing for a certain goal. In some scenarios the dashboard’s goal may be to detect defects, in others it may be to generate the most profit. As our primary research interest is to amplify energy efficiency, we have chosen that to be our dashboard’s goal. Our previous work suggests that in order to handle compound metrics at scale it is needed to represent the dashboard as a complex system. This paper presents the design and the architecture of our proposed solution synergizing the notions from complexity theory, software architecture and user experience (UX) design.