TRG Screen has released a powerful new enhancement to their Research Monitor product. The new Optimize Insights platform provides visual analytics for proactive management of digital resources. Law libraries were already reducing their print resources before the 2020 pandemic. The sudden and long term shift to remote work resulted in a dramatic conversion to digital resources. This means that a significant proportion of the resources budget has shifted to digital formats. What’s a law librarians to do? Research Monitor has always offered a significant suite of digital reports for computing utilization ROI. This is often translated as “cost per user” and “cost per session.” The Optimize platform is more flexible and intuitive and offers great “out of the box” graphics.
Optimize Insights sits at the heart of TRG Screen’s new Optimize platform, which launched in 2020.  Resource monitoring platforms are a “must have” for Library Directors and Knowledge Managers responsible for optimizing digital resource budgets. Instead of random

anecdotes about value, Research Monitor can provide real data on users and usage which can inform negotiation and budget planning strategies. The Optimize Platform is Research Monitor on steroids.
Richard. Mundell, Chief Product Officer, Provided me with a demo of the new product. Mundell described Optimize as a paradigm shift. I might  describe it as adding an “easy button.” Instead of sorting out mountains of data, Knowledge and Library Directors will not have an “out of the box” solution with creates a  “story” about the information consumption patterns in their organization.
Key features in this first release allow users to see the high-level picture based on the requirements of their role before drilling into the detail, and includes:
  • Insights Library: Specially curated library of story-based visualizations and dashboards
  • Dashboard Studio: Interactive dashboard designer allows users to create their own dashboards.
  • Pivot Studio: Intuitive web-based pivot table interface to manipulate underlying data with slice-and-dice drag-and-drop analytics and visualization capabilities.
Currently subscribers need to be on the Cloud version of Research Monitor – but they are developing an “on-prem” version.
Mundell is quoted in the press release on the value of Optimize Insights, “Firms need sophisticated, granular and flexible insights in self-service dashboards with drilldown capabilities and interactive reports powered by business intelligence and data visualization tools.”

As the economy teeters at the precipice, as law firm hunker down for an uncertain 2023, the easy access to powerful ROI insights delivered  by the Optimize platform are well timed for market needs.

And there is more to come. Here are just some of the features planned for the coming year.

  • Remainder of the reporting content from Research Monitor
  • Ability to schedule dashboards to send to business users automatically via e-mail
  • Ability to publish dashboards to business users who can access them on-line and interact with them
  • Ability to create calculated fields
  • Combined spend + usage data (integrating data from Research Monitor and Optimize Spend)
  • All of the reporting content from Quest
  • Direct access to Power BI Pro (so you can create reports using “full fat” Power BI and then publish them back to other users via the Optimize Insights portal)
  • “Bring your own data” (the ability to upload data from other sources and integrate that data into dashboards within Optimize Insights)
  • Additional automated trend analysis and narrative insights
  • Natural language queries