In case you missed them, here are some recent articles about IDV and our product, Visual Fusion:

Building Geo-Enabled Mashups in Minutes [GIS Cafe]

“A new version of Visual Fusion, Visual Fusion 4.0, was released in May by IDV Solutions. The visual mashup software offers integration between Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and geospatial mashup technology. How this integration works is that Visual Fusion extends features of SharePoint-lists, libraries, templates and Web parts-to automate geo-tagging and provide an interactive, visual user interface, according to Scott Caulk, product manager at IDV Solutions. Users can work with familiar tools such as Microsoft Office and create geo-enabled Word and PowerPoint documents, Excel spreadsheets and SharePoint Lists and Libraries and integrate these seamlessly into map applications and other mashups.” – Susan Smith, GIS Cafe

Visual Fusion 4.0: Getting the Enterprise Excited about Visualization [Directions Magazine]

“So, what is Visual Fusion? I'd describe it as a solution for integrating geodata and services (especially those of SharePoint) into map-focused applications. IDV doesn't use the term GIS in describing the solution. Instead, if pressed, CTO Ian Clemens describes IDV Solutions as a "mashup company." With clients like NGA, Toyota, the United Nations and NYPD, that seems a bit too informal, though it is technically accurate.” – Adena Schutzberg, Directions Magazine

I’m catching up on a few significant news releases we’ve had here at IDV in the last couple of weeks. Last week we announced:

IDV Solutions Launches Visual Fusion in the Cloud: Integrates with Azure, OGDI & Data.gov

Visual Fusion, our SharePoint-based geospatial mashup platform, is now integrated with the cloud on Microsoft’s Azure. As an example of the powerful visual mashup capabilities of Visual Fusion, we developed a demonstration application that integrates content from the Open Government Initiative’s Data.gov, Microsoft’s Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI), and Bing Maps in our user-friendly Silverlight interface.

Enabling Visual Fusion’s visual mashup and dashboarding capabilities in the cloud is an exciting milestone for us. The implications for organizations to rapidly create enterprise mashups that integrate data from virtually any data source into an endless number of applications are staggering. Doing this in a powerful cloud platform like Azure creates little to no strain on our customers’ internal systems and resources, and takes the value of Visual Fusion to a whole new level.

See the demonstration live at http://visualfusion.cloudapp.net

Visual Fusion from IDV Solutions combines with Bing Maps, SharePoint and other Microsoft technologies to create a visual mashup platform, empowering organizations to unite data from otherwise incompatible sources - enterprise data stores, Web feeds, spreadsheets and more - into rapidly-built, interactive and collaborative applications that provide a single view of the data.

Join the Microsoft Bing Maps team, IDV Solutions and Directions Media for a complimentary webinar that discusses how the Bing Maps and Visual Fusion technologies can help you plan, predict and respond quickly, plus efficiently manage and analyze the overwhelming amount of data that flow through your agencies and departments on a daily basis.

Featuring:
Louis Effa, Director of Information Technology for the Maritime Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, will present a case study demonstrating how these technologies from Microsoft and IDV Solutions are helping the Maritime Administration to fuse data together to create models and simulations for capacity planning, economic impact analysis, on-demand forecasting and plans for mitigating and reacting to emergency situations.

This webinar will highlight how:

· Visual Fusion empowers everyone in an organization to create interactive, geospatial mashups from unlimited sources of data.

· Visual Fusion provides a streamlined platform for building killer apps that drive agility, collaboration and insight.

· Bing Maps brings clarity to business intelligence data and augments situational awareness.

· Bing Maps integrates with other Microsoft technologies to provide the visualization for collaborative, geospatial data applications.

"Putting dots on a map and simple mashups are no longer enough. Businesses and organizations need true location intelligence... a comprehensive, integrated solution that presents an interactive picture to give decisions-makers a 360 degree view of their operations. IDV Solutions and Microsoft have a solution geospatial professionals, and those looking to utilize geospatial, need to see."

Joe Francica
Vice Publisher and Editor in Chief, Directions Media

Today we're pleased to announce Visual Fusion’s extensive integration with Microsoft Office.

Read the press release [IDV Solutions].

In the newest release of VF, users are empowered more than ever to create enterprise mashup feeds using Office products, and, conversely, to pull data from their mashups into Office. We’ve integrated Visual Fusion with the ever-ubiquitous Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, InfoPath, Excel, and, of course, SharePoint Portal.

For example, take the scenario of an emergency operations center (EOC) coordinator, in the threat of a hurricane, looking to grab data on employee residence locations. She could quickly zoom to the Orlando, FL area:

and then create a quick spatial radius query:

and Voila! Visual Fusion generates the appropriate Excel spreadsheet output.

Conversely, the EOC coordinator could upload Excel spreadsheet data into a Visual Fusion-enabled SharePoint document library and have that data visualized as a feed in Visual Fusion. Here are Suspected FL swine flu cases (fictitious) driven directly from a live Excel spreadsheet:

As the Excel spreadsheet is updated, so is the Virtual Earth map—very cool!

For a live demonstration or more information, please Contact Us.

We’re excited to announce a new system integration partner, Geomatic Technologies, out of Australia. Yes, Australia! Interest in Visual Fusion has grown considerably over the last 18 months in the geospatial-savvy market of Australia. Geomatic Technologies has been successfully serving this market and now will be offering powerful geospatial enterprise mashup solutions built on IDV’s Visual Fusion software.

With the recent natural disasters that hit Australia, Victoria (bushfires) and Queensland (flooding), timely response, recovery, and rehabilitation is top of mind. Geomatic Technologies, armed with Visual Fusion, is helping to drive agile response by providing accurate data and technology to deliver critical information in a timely and useful manner.

See the joint Press Release [Directions Magazine]

If you’re interested in connecting with an IDV partner in your area or want more information on Visual Fusion, please Contact Us.

This week at the DoDIIS (US Department of Defense) conference in Orlando, FL our team wowed attendees with a compelling integration of live Twitter feeds within our recently launched Visual Fusion 4.0. The demonstration scenario highlighted the use of Twitter streams for gaining real-time situational awareness during a crisis. In Visual Fusion, live Twitter feed locations were overlaid on a map-based visualization, using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth mapping, along with other live and real-time feeds such as weather (and we had a lot of it this week in Orlando!), USGS alerts, Reuters news, US Census demographics and NASA imagery.

In addition to a map visual, viewers of the demonstration were able to see relevant Twitter feeds pertaining to Central Florida in an interactive Silverlight data grid sortable by location, username, time, and content.

Look for an official product release of our Visual Fusion Twitter visualization in the coming weeks, or Contact Us for more information and a demonstration.

Today we released Visual Fusion 4 (VF4), the most comprehensive visual mashup software in the market. With VF4, everyone in an organization is empowered to build interactive, business-focused applications in days or weeks, not months or years.

Long a hallmark of IDV, the world-class user experience of Visual Fusion has been expanded to include Silverlight, taking compelling, high performing applications to the next level of usability within an organization (take a test drive at vf4demo.idvsolutions.com).

This new release of Visual Fusion continues to push the envelope of SharePoint integration: new Visual Fusion mashup applications can be built within SharePoint utilizing site templates, workflow, security, lists, libraries, and Visual Fusion application building GUIs suitable for anyone. Visual Fusion geospatially-enables SharePoint by embedding location and time in Lists and Libraries, and then providing a mechanism to easily syndicate or publish List and Library content in geospatial formats such as KML and GeoRSS from inside SharePoint. Real-time user contribution is also brought into SharePoint with Visual Fusion Contribute, an iPhone App that sends geo-tagged photos and comments to a SharePoint Library.

Enterprise search has also been incorporated within VF4, so now all content connected to Visual Fusion is available to be searched: SharePoint content, web feeds (GeoRSS & KML), Excel data, Oracle, ESRI, and line of business systems—they all fall under the domain of VF4 Enterprise Search. All of these capabilities drive the main value points that Visual Fusion brings to the enterprise: rapid insight, business agility, and increased productivity.

This is another game changing moment for organizations seeking the value of visual, enterprise mashups inside the familiar world of SharePoint. It has never been easier to benefit from the power of Enterprise 2.0 than it is right now with Visual Fusion.

If you missed our recent webcast on building visual enterprise mashups with Visual Fusion, I’m happy to report that it’s been recorded!

Navigate to:

On Demand Event Webcast (click on on Register and the click to View Online).

PC World magazine just published an overview of Microsoft’s Global Security Operations Center (a video overview of the GSOC can be found here).

Microsoft Global System Aids Worker Rescue

The article does a great job of highlighting the innovation that Microsoft’s GSOC is bringing to security through software like SharePoint and Visual Fusion, and, of course, other Microsoft products.

You can view the entire article here.

A great use case for Visual Fusion is building out a common operational picture, aka COP. A COP is a shared, often collaborative, view of information pertinent to an operation or situation. In my experience with our IDV customers, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, a COP is visual; ninety times out of a hundred, the COP view is contextualized on a map. Critical information, coming from various internal systems, alert & news feeds, and any other relevant source, is then “visually fused” onto the COP view.

Visual Fusion facilitates best of breed COPs in five important ways:

Connects to virtually any data source within the enterprise or on the web

Visual Fusion offers out of the box connectors (e.g., Oracle, ESRI, SharePoint) as well as an SDK to connect to virtually any data source, whether it’s  twitter “tweets” for situational awareness, or asset information from an enterprise system like SAP.

Create custom variables & hotspots to alert users to important information

With Visual Fusion, you can easily create visual rules to alert viewers of the COP to status changes, new information, or sudden alerts.

Visualize Information in Meaningful Context through standard templates, as well as custom visualization templates that can be downloaded through an application hub.

Visual Fusion’s App Hub allows you to create customized visualizations and COP application templates that can be saved, re-used, and shared out to a wider audience.

Provide permission-based publishing and workflow integration so people have access to information and the collaboration tools they need

Critical for an effective COP is permissions-based viewing and robust security. Visual Fusion provides a whole host of security options so that only accredited viewers get their information.

Enable contribution from individuals in real-time through applications like SharePoint or through mobile devices

And finally, perhaps leaving the most important point for last, Visual Fusion supports a bevy of contribution options, whether it be through an iPhone, AIS feed, or geospatial wiki, so that your COP always has the most current, relevant information.

From Scott Caulk’s Visual Fusion product blog:

This is going to be awesome.

On April 22 Microsoft will be hosting a webcast for us where we will unveil Visual Fusion 4 and demonstrate building situational awareness applications from scatch in just a few minutes.  The Visual Fusion platform is making a huge leap forward with this release and it empowers the enterprise to do things that cannot be done with any other product.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Lightning fast application development via gorgeous GUIs (we'll demonstrate this)

• Silverlight front-ends on the apps for world-class UX (you'll see this and be blown away)

• Enterprise Search across all connected content (we'll show this, too)

We are taking enterprise mashup creation in SharePoint to new heights, leveraging workflow, site templates, security, etc. to build state-of-the-art, enterprise-ready, rich internet applications.  If you are interested in Virtual Earth, location intelligence, getting GIS out to a broader community, or just figuring out how to quickly and meaningfully combine data coming from diverse organizational and cloud sources, then you will not want to miss this webcast. 

You can register here today to make sure that you are a part of it:  Rapidly Building Enterprise Mashups for Greater Situational Awareness with SharePoint, Virtual Earth, & Visual Fusion.

Please join us!

We at IDV often get the question on the extent of our Visual Fusion product’s integration with Microsoft SharePoint. In short, the answer is “A lot”. Visual Fusion’s integration with SharePoint is unparalleled in the marketplace, and goes much beyond what other companies call SharePoint integration; that is, it goes much beyond using SharePoint only as a container for a web page.

I thought it would be helpful to delineate our integration as well as point out how we’ve empowered visual enterprise mashups by combining the two products, so I’ve asked Riyaz Prasla, our Visual Fusion Program Manager, to elaborate below.

Take it away, Riyaz…

SharePoint Content Types

Fundamentally, Visual Fusion extends SharePoint List and Document Library Content Types to store location and time attributes. Any content then can be syndicated out as standards such as GeoRSS, KML, and GML. For example, when adding or editing items in a list or library users can type in a location and/or visually pick a location on the map (see picture).

Similarly, users can enter a timestamp value for the item, which is then mapped to <pubDate> in GeoRSS and <TimeStamp> in KML so that this data can visualized in context of a timeline in Visual Fusion Map Viewer (see picture) or, even, Google Earth.  

SharePoint Shared Services

Visual Fusion integrates with and extends SharePoint Shared Services such as:

1. Excel Services - Users can upload a excel spreadsheet of locations (aka, points of interest) to a document library, geocode records within that spreadsheet, and then visually view the results, whether that’s a map, timeline, or scatter plot (see picture).

2. Enterprise Search - Visual Fusion Search will not only index geospatial content stored within SharePoint but also enable SharePoint to connect & index geospatial data residing in enterprise systems and cloud data, from Oracle to SQL Server to SAP.

Publishing

Visual Fusion extends SharePoint publishing to enable viewing of a VF-enabled List or Library data in GeoRSS or KML format.

Enterprise Mashup Creation & Management Tools

Visual Fusion allows power users to rapidly create & setup enterprise mashups with:

1. AppHub - A central location in SharePoint for business users to create new Visual Fusion applications, browse & launch existing Visual Fusion applications within the organization, and access valuable resources such as How-To’s and user guides.  Users can instantiate a new Visual Fusion Application from one of the site templates that is provided out-of-the box or choose from any custom site templates that they have added. (Please note that AppHub will be available with Visual Fusion 4.0 to be released in Q2 of this year).

2. Composer - A highly intuitive drag-and-drop interface (right in SharePoint) for power users to organize, style & publish feeds coming from disparate sources into a single unified view.

Yes, that's right! The iPhone meets SharePoint. Very soon we at IDV Solutions will be launching Visual Fusion Contribute, a first-of-its-kind mobile collaboration and contribution tool. We are smitten by the location-based capabilities of the iPhone, and set out to develop an application that would allow our enterprise customers to submit geotagged notes and photos from their iPhone directly into a Visual Fusion-enabled SharePoint Library. Using Visual Fusion, our enterprise mashup platform for SharePoint, organizations will then be able to share out those submissions in a mashup of their own creation, or syndicate out the contributions via GeoRSS, KML, or GML (all of which are supported in Visual Fusion) into their favorite map viewer.

The net of it is that employees in the field are empowered to make valuable, location-relevant contributions. A few examples of how Visual Fusion Contribute can be utilized:

• An emergency operations center (EOC) can combine, in Visual Fusion, feet-on-the-street Contribute photos with other pertinent law enforcement feeds, public map data, and current traffic to gain a better common operational picture (COP), all within a robust SharePoint environment.
• A field crew inspecting a pipeline in Alaska can post geotagged pictures of potential trouble spots back to the enterprise portal
• Event security at a large sports venue can gain situational awareness by visualizing, on a Virtual Earth map, geo-relevant photos & notes submitted by security personnel
• A Fortune 500 company can use Visual Fusion Contribute to help track the safety and whereabouts of top executives, within the security of their enterprise portal framework
• Using Visual Fusion with SharePoint Search, a project team can search by project keywords and location for geo-relevant photos and notes

Empowering employees to contribute business content from their mobile devices is a powerful enabler, and I'm sure the usage examples I name above are just the tip of the iceberg. I look forward to hearing how our customers utilize Contribute.

If you'd like additional information on Visual Fusion Contribute, or would like to see a pre-release demonstration, please contact us.

In case you missed it, Visual Fusion was this week featured on gisuser.com in an article entitled:

Creating Enterprise Mashups in SharePoint

Deborah Davis, the author of the article, does a great job of telling the Visual Fusion user empowerment story:

"Users without IT expertise can create mashups on demand using Visual Fusion's drag-and-drop interface. This means greater productivity for both the IT department and general business users; once a data source is configured (via an XML file) to work with Visual Fusion, it can be used in multiple mashups, with minimal need for IT resources."

This is a story both the business unit and IT can be excited about: empower the business people to create business-specific apps while freeing up IT resources!

Many IDV customers, from Department of Defense/Intelligence agencies to Emergency Operations Centers (EOC), have expressed interest in a Visual Fusion deployment that is not reliant on a connection to an outside network; namely, the Internet. Where information security is top of mind (as in the case of Ministries of Defense) and/or mapping is mission critical for emergency response (as in the case of crisis management), a complete on-premise, secure network solution makes a lot of sense.

With that in mind, I'm happy to report that we yesterday announced Visual Fusion integration with Microsoft's Virtual Earth Server.

For those unfamiliar with Virtual Earth Server, think of it as Virtual Earth in a box, so to speak: all the rich Virtual Earth 2D and 3D mapping, high resolution imagery, and precise geocoding, within the confines of your secure, private network.

By now offering a combined Visual Fusion / Virtual Earth Server solution, our customers with the need for an on-premise solution can have the full power of our Visual Fusion enterprise mashup platform for creating geospatial applications--in SharePoint--without the requirement for an Internet connection.

Read the Full Press Release Here

Our friend at Microsoft, Patrick Foley, was out at our IDV offices a few weeks ago to interview Scott Caulk, product manager for Visual Fusion. Patrick is doing a video series on innovative software companies building on the Microsoft product stack, and wanted to talk to us about how Visual Fusion is extending SharePoint into an enterprise mashup platform.

Scott does a great job talking through Visual Fusion and demoing its capabilities.

The video is now launched and available on Microsoft's ISV Innovation site.

View Here!

I want to bring two events to your attention, both sponsored by the good folks at the IT advisory firm Zapthink. The webinar & podcast are centered on an important topic (especially in today's economy): empowering you to create and tweak your own applications for your business needs.

Webinar

On January 28th at 1PM ET, please join us for

Empowering Business Users: Building Visual Composite Apps on Demand

Here's the description:

In this webinar Ronald Schmelzer, Senior Analyst at ZapThink, will present on the value SOA brings to the enterprise when Business Professionals build the business focused applications and IT Professionals concentrate on provisioning the services for those applications. Scott Caulk, IDV Solutions' Product Manager, will then present on how IDV Solutions’ Visual Fusion product leverages Microsoft’s SharePoint and empowers the entire organization to create dynamic, interactive, Enterprise 2.0 mash-ups. Webinar attendees will learn about the business value of combining disparate content in meaningful and actionable ways, how portal-based composite applications foster contribution to and collaboration around critical business issues, and ultimately how the Visual Fusion platform fuels real Business Empowerment that brings competitive advantage and tangible ROI to the enterprise

Podcast

In December we had a joint podcast entitled: Empowering Business Users with Self-Service Composite Application Platforms. In the podcast, Scott Caulk, product manager for Visual Fusion, discussed

1. The role self-service composite applications can play in the enterprise
2. Understanding situational applications
3. The importance of location for contextualizing disparate information

The podcast in its entirety can be downloaded for free as an MP3 here.

In the current down economy, solid ROI and value calculations for enterprise IT are paramount. Today, in part 3 of 3 of our series, we drill down into estimating Strategic Value of visual composite applications (VCA), particularly VCAs built using our Visual Fusion platform. Composite applications, an important part of any Enterprise 2.0 strategy, are highly valuable to an organization in that they bring together disparate and various systems, feeds, and data sources into compelling, focused applications that meet a particular business need. In our Visual Fusion Value Estimator model
(which can be downloaded at Visual Fusion Value Estimator.xls)
we estimate Visual Composite Application (VCA) value through two lenses:

1. Operational Savings; and 
2. Strategic Value

In a previous blog we talked about Operational Savings gained through Visual Fusion: shortened workflows, more efficient processes, and the incorporation of geospatial into workflows, for example. Today we talk about Strategic Value. Strategic value includes great benefits like better decision making, data exploration & discovery, user empowerment, and visually integrating disparate information. These benefits are very real to an organization but often difficult to quantify; these are sometimes referred to as "soft ROI" benefits.

Estimating Strategic Value

One of the biggest benefits of composite applications (aka enterprise mashups) is the ability to integrate disparate information into one application to meet a particular business need; better still, is visually integrating disparate information (a la our Visual Fusion product).

In our Value Estimator (which can be downloaded at Visual Fusion Value Estimator.xls) we focus solely on this Strategic Value benefit: visually integrating data sets. One way to quantify this benefit is through an organization's usage of a Visual Fusion composite application--if an employee is spending time using a Visual Fusion application, quite simply, they are deriving value from it. Further, we assume that the value of an application goes up with the number of data sets & systems that are integrated; i.e., the more relevant, applicable data you can see at once, the richer the value of the application. In the Visual Fusion Value Estimator we have a template for calculating this benefit as seen here:

Broken down, this calculation says that value of a composite application built with Visual Fusion increases with the:

• Number of data sets & systems integrated
• Number of employees/partners/stakeholders viewing the application
• Frequency of use
• Hours of use / day

Most of these make sense intuitively: 20 people using the application is 2x better than 10 people. Using the application 3 hours a day is 3x more valuable than 1 hour a day. What may not be so intuitive is how the application value scales with the number of data sets and systems, aka the number of feeds. For this we use the logarithm function (remember from math class?), effectively saying that the value of a composite application scales with powers of 10: 100 feeds is 2x more valuable than 10, 1000 feeds is 3x more valuable than 10, and so on.

Now we multiply those factors with an average $ output per hour per employee of $50 (see sidebar, "Output per Employee-Hour?"), and we arrive at our final number of annual strategic value.

Jerry Skaw of the Microsoft Virtual Earth team has a nice write up on the Geoint conference in Nashville last week: Wrap-up: Virtual Earth at GEOINT 2008. We were there at the Microsoft booth demonstrating the integration of SharePoint Portal and Virtual Earth through our Visual Fusion product. Jerry writes:

For the Virtual Earth and Sharepoint integration, Microsoft partner IDV Solutions joined us to demonstrate this visualization/collaboration capability through the beta version of their new SpatialWiki product. Geared for enterprise customers but public in Beta, SpatialWiki combines a Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 / Virtual Earth interface & Microsoft Cloud services (or Sharepoint) for storage and archiving of user contributed data. My buddy John Nelson describes the SpatialWiki in his blog (see screenshot below) and a press release can be found here. Read those and then go play with the demo application ... just a lot of fun.

All in all, we had a lot of fun with the Microsoft team demonstrating geospatially-enabled Sharepoint!

In yesterday's entry we introduced the Visual Fusion Value Estimator model, which can be downloaded here:

 Visual Fusion Value Estimator.xls

In the model we look at estimating Visual Composite Application (VCA) value through two lenses:

1. Operational Savings; and
2. Strategic Value

Today we drill down into Estimating Operational Savings.

1. Estimating Operational Savings

Visual Fusion can save organizations money through transforming work processes. Bringing data together in one, single view can bring operational savings by reducing steps or even eliminating outmoded workflows. For example, a vice president for one of our Fortune 500 Oil & Gas customers wrote us a letter that Visual Fusion brought $8 million dollars in it's first year of use for one application, one department!

In the Visual Fusion Value Estimator we have a template for calculating savings for processes that have been shortened or made more efficient through Visual Fusion. You can enter in any process title and parameter values, and you can add multiple processes. In our example below we've entered a process loosely based on one of our US government client's processes. We'll call it "Sharing out Infectious Disease Case Information (as seen in the screenshot below)."

The analyst at this particular agency, some 52 times a year (i.e., weekly), prepares a report for high-level government stakeholders. The process steps, before Visual Fusion, included (1) manually entering and (2) geocoding infectious disease outbreak points in a desktop mapping program, (3) creating a corresponding spreadsheet of case information, (4) PDF'ing the documents into an attachment, and (5) e-mailing the report out to stakeholders. After the distribution of the e-mail, ad hoc queries from the stakeholders consisted of requests for (6) additional imagery like population and updates to the spreadsheet data. Altogether there were 6 steps to this process, estimated at 2 hours per step.

With Visual Fusion, this "Sharing out Infectious Disease Case Information" process was shortened considerably for this analyst and made more efficient. A geospatial portal was set-up using IDV's Visual Fusion product, and Microsoft Virtual Earth and SharePoint portal products. A Visual Fusion  interactive map view was configured within the portal and populated by geo-enabled SharePoint lists (made possible through Visual Fusion). All the stakeholders were given credentialed access to the portal, and subscribed via RSS to weekly update notifications. The map view included the ability to zoom into any location on Earth and to toggle on and off population map overlays.

The result is that stakeholders are now empowered to run their own scenarios, discover information on their own, and with the proper credentials, edit the attribute data; i.e., the stakeholders can now collaborate and contribute. The process for the analyst is now only one step per week, and takes about an hour: (1) entering and updating infectious disease data.

The operational savings for that process? After entering in the above data into the Visual Fusion Value Estimator (see screenshot above), the savings is estimated at $28,600 per year for this process alone.

The spreadsheet model also allows for multiple processes to be added based on your business situation. For example, in this scenario, we could go on to calculate how much savings there is for the stakeholders themselves. They now have access to an interactive application that allows them to answer their questions quickly, and on their time schedules, saving them valuable time. In reality, there is an ROI for everyone that uses the new Visual Fusion system.

In our next blog we'll go on to cover the estimation of Strategic Value for visual composite applications, value derived from benefits such as better decision making and data visualization.