If you have an interest in business intelligence (BI) visualizations or effective dashboard design, I strongly recommend subscribing to Stephen Few's blog and newsletter.

In reading Stephen's blog, I noticed we have a similar skepticism for flashy dashboard gauges. As a student of Tufte, I've come to appreciate the art of multi-variate displays and information design, so it comes as a disappointment to see the industry abuzz with a new generation of reporting tools, dashboard widgets, and components that favor presentation over information.

At last years Dreamforce event, a chorus of "oooohs" and "ahhhhs" filled the room as support for new dashboard visualizations were demonstrated. Some of the new components, such as heat maps and geo maps, were indeed an improvement over what is available today. But there was a fair share of the "flashy" reports too.

The fact is, Salesforce dashboards as they exist today are quite useful and simple. They prevent you from masking true information with needless features like drop shadows and 3D effects.

The gating barrier to implementing useful multi-variate visualizations in Salesforce dashboards is not the UI controls. It's the data itself. Because Salesforce is an OLTP (online transactional processing system) system you cannot simply create a report that summarizes across multiple dimensions in real-time.

Yes, there will always be work-arounds and acceptable compromises, but I suspect that business intelligence in the SaaS world will follow a similar path as enterprise software did in the legacy client-server world, which is to normalize the data into data warehouses that can support ad-hoc queries and pivoting on data.

But SaaS vendors have the benefit of hindsight and are progressively learning to build OLAP and data warehousing support into, or in parallel to production systems; much like our Web Events data mart that gets created in Salesforce, replicating and normalizing all web interactions into the CRM system in near real-time.