News

CXO gets daily data to execs desktops

• By Rich Seeley
• July 30, 2003

Emerging XML Web services-based data networks are business executives’ lifeline, at least in the view of Michael Carter, executive vice president of CXO Systems, Waltham, Mass.

With new regulations requiring that so-called C-level executives -- CEOs, COOs, CFOs -- understand the nitty-gritty of their businesses before signing off on financial documents, these executives need daily data on their desktops, Carter said.

This week his company moved to solve that problem with the shipping of CXO 3.0, a Web services-based executive dashboard that includes an agent for developers to use to create what CXO terms Business Information Networks or BINs.

Carter explained that BINs are essentially personal networks for business executives and other business users who need quick access to bits of data scattered throughout the enterprise.

“Our view of the world is a company will have multiple BINs,” he told XML Report. “BINs are nothing more than the most commonly used information you need for your job. If I run the marketing operations, what are the 20 things I need to track on a daily basis? To do my job I would have my own BIN.”

Once the BIN is created by a back-end developer, it can pull XML data via Web services connections from sources ranging from data warehouses to Excel spreadsheets and put it on the business executive’s personal dashboard.

The CXO product demonstrates another way XML Web services can be used to solve the problem of how to make data warehouses work for individual users, Carter said.

“What we’re really doing is slicing the data warehouse, enabling them to make it a virtual data warehouse using their existing infrastructure to create these reusable BINs,” he said.

More information is available at www.CXOSystems.com.