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.

Operational dashboards

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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

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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.

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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

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.

Meaningful design for more effective dashboards article

Article

Performance Perspectives- Aug 2007

BIScorecard - Suite Integration Analyst Report

Analyst Report

Cobbled together products or one BI platform: how deep does suite integration really go?

IBM Cognos Now!

Web Link

Discover real-time operational dashboards with IBM Cognos Now!