The response I read from the CIO's social media posting was that they were going to keep moving forward in this direction, no plans to turn back. Seems like a damn the torpedo's, full steam ahead approach.
Personally, I don't use it much. It has always been eye candy from before and now it's the same eye candy but broken eye candy. The dots for live visitors, if they show up, are hard to see with their pulsating color scheme. Just put a black dot. Make it clear -I don't need a pulsating color - just a dot - thank you. A big dot if two locations overlap so I can zoom in and see detail if needed. I understand the color scheme to denote visits as they are trying to conserve space on the screen. But the line chart was much clearer and you can get exact numbers for visits, not just know there were more at one time than another. Same with sales transactions, I prefer the line chart. I've read through this thread and totally understand some of the value others see in this tool and how it's lost value to them. Especially if they are advertising and want to see real-time if they send out an email blast who's responding and in what areas.
I just use google ads if I want to see anything in real time. It's much better but I don't get the real-time sales feed.
The question I have is while it is interesting to see and fun to watch sales go past and dots on the screen, how is this really useful? What can I do with the live view to actively react to what I'm seeing on the screen? You really need to run reports and do some analysis off-line to produce value. Just seeing all this on the screen in real-time is cool and all, but I don't see how this is really useful for decision making. If I need to see trends (and that's useful) then I'll run a report.
