Cognos Dashboard Creation Business Intelligence

What is a Dashboard? A dashboard is a collection of information in one place. An effective dashboard is a collection of reports that highlight meaningful information that can be acted upon. –High level summaries that easily allow access to underlying detail. –Graphs that summarize large data sets efficiently. –Visual indicators that draw attention to key facts.

Why make a Dashboard? Ease of use –One centralized location for users –Simplifies navigation –Can be included in a Portal Time savings –Visual indicators highlight items needing further attention –Users can be saved from running reports needlessly

How to Create a Dashboard 1. Plan your design –Think about reports that would be useful –Think how the data would best be presented –Think about the visual layout  How will the dashboard be viewed  Grouping related data together makes for a logical layout 2. Write the dashboard as any other report. It just takes more care arranging multiple report objects on one page. 3. Write your supporting drill through reports and setup your drill through definitions the dashboard. 4. (optional) Create a new portal page to display the dashboard in its own tab.

Example For my example we will use this audit dashboard

Example This dashboard is meant to highlight report usage over time. It will be displayed in a portal tab so sizing is important. I want to organize it so related items are near each other. Each chart has a drill through to a full scale version with additional drill throughs for more detail Each graph is 200 x 200 pixels in a 3 by 2 table. Report Grouping User Grouping

Example

Creating a Portal Tab Click on New Page.Click on New Page. After naming, select the number of columns. Add portal elements.Add portal elements. Check View the page and hit finish.Check View the page and hit finish. Enter a title.Enter a title. Cognos Viewer allows viewing reports

Creating a Portal Tab You now have this portal tab. You just have to define the settings of each element.

Cognos Navigator Tile is entered here, if left blank Cognos Navigator is displayed. Channel name allows reports to be opened in the Cognos viewer. Select the folder you want to display when the page loads.

Cognos Viewer Tile is entered here, if left blank the report name is displayed. Standard Report options. Channel name that matches what was entered in Cognos navigator Portal size only accepts the unit pixels.

RSS Viewer The RSS View just needs an RSS url to display.

Final Product Html object

Conclusion We have created an effective dashboard portal using a few simple objects. –A report with 6 graphs in a 3 by 2 table. –A portal page with 3 standard portal components  Cognos Navigator  Cognos Viewer  RSS Viewer With a little planning a very complex looking dashboard is relatively simple to create.