IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

Dashboards

Business dashboards communicate complex information quickly. They translate information from your various corporate systems and data into visually rich presentations using gauges, maps, charts, and other graphical elements to show multiple results together.

Cognos, an IBM company, offers the full range of dashboards — operational, tactical, strategic — to help you monitor, measure, and manage corporate performance.

You can deploy Cognos dashboards as a standalone application or as a core element of an enterprise business intelligence or performance management platform.

Information-rich, visually appealing displays

• Provide business users at every level receive the information they need to make better decisions that improve business performance.
• Communicate common business patterns and relationships: trends, rank, part-to-whole, deviation, correlation.
• Wide array of chart types (bar, line, gauge, scatterplot, maps) let you match the data to the display.
• Conditional formatting and exception highlighting draw users' attention to sub-par results and areas that need immediate attention.
• Aggregate data from disparate systems into a single view.
• Drill-down / drill-through to reports and analysis for additional information and context.
• Control when and how you receive critical information by creating personalized alerts, based on custom data conditions.
• A single architecture for viewing, querying, analyzing, and authoring for collaborative contributions to any report or dashboard.
• Global dashboard filters let users seamlessly orchestrate changes across multiple objects in a portal page.

New in version 8.4: IBM Cognos 8 Go! Dashboard

Personalize your business intelligence environment with a simple-to-use Flash interface:

• Personalized dashboards inform users of current performance and trends.
• Drag-and-drop authoring engages you with your data.
• Access to expanded data sources keeps your decisions aligned with corporate goals.

Dynamic business intelligence

• Flash-based graphics let you build attractive, interactive dashboards quickly.
• Client-side data capture gives you near-instant response times to repeated queries and layout changes.

Personalized information

• Drag-and drop-interface lets you create dashboards on the fly; no need to wait for IT or search for existing content.
• Modular report creation lets you build dashboards using existing report elements.

Trusted data source

• Build your dashboards using trusted Cognos information.
• Use existing report elements for complete, consistent view of results.

Extensible environment

• Bring external information into your business with RSS feeds and widgets.
• Integrate your dashboard into third-party portals.

Operational dashboards

	Show me the demo!

Track core operational processes with continuous data refreshes.

Benefits:

• Monitor operational processes as they happen.
• Get immediate visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) for corrective action and rapid decision-making.
• Enable exception-based decisions with alerts.
• Provide links to associated reports.
• Self-serve authoring & editing.

Tactical dashboards

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Run against data marts or data warehouses to track departmental processes and projects.

Benefits:

• Monitor performance on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
• Get visibility into performance of departmental activities, processes, and projects.
• Integrate into your corporate portal or deploy as a standalone report.
• Drill-down or drill-through to reports and analysis for additional information or context.

Strategic dashboards/Scorecards

	Show me the demo!

Monitor execution of corporate strategic objectives at each level of the organization.

Benefits:

• Track progress against strategic corporate goals
• Map key connections among departments and cause-and-effect relationships between or across departments.
• Support management methodologies including Balanced Scorecard, TQM, Six Sigma, etc.
• Drill-down to reports and analysis for additional information or context.

Additional Resources:

Visual Communication: Core Design Principles for Displaying Quantitative Information

White Paper

Learn to build reports that communicate more clearly, based on the latest research into perception and understanding. Part 1 of a 3-part series by Stephen Few

Extending BI with Dashboards

White Paper

Making information accessible with rich graphical analysis, IBM Cognos 8 Go! Dashboard facilitates decision-making and fosters an information-based business climate.

How IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence meets the needs of business managers

White Paper

Helping business managers develop decision-making strategies with confidence by facilitating expedient and accurate data filtration.

Visual Pattern Recognition: Meaningful Patterns in Quantitative Business Information

White Paper

Bar chart or line graph? This paper examines the data patterns and relationships common in most business reports and provides practical guidelines for communicating these relationships effectively using points, lines, and bars. Part 2 of a 3-part series by Stephen Few.

Data Visualization: Past, Present, and future

White Paper

Spanning more than 2,000 years of recorded human history, this paper examines the birth and evolution of data visualization, from early Egyptian tables used to organize astronomical information through to bar charts, treemaps, and geo-spatial visualization tools (such as Google Earth). Part 3 of a 3-part series by Stephen Few

Full Demo: IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

Online Demo

Complete capabilities in one product, on a single architecture. See key features for both business and IT users, including Framework Manager, the Adminstration Console, and integration with Microsoft Excel.

Picturing Performance Dashboards and Scorecards with Cognos

White Paper

This white paper outlines the three types of dashboards (operational, tactical, strategic) as described by TDWI's Wayne Eckerson and illustrates how to build them using IBM Cognos Now! and IBM Cognos 8 BI. Explains the role of dashboarding in a performance management deployment. Illustrations.

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