IBM Cognos Business Intelligence: Discover the practical approach to BI with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

A self-service dashboard is a tool that puts the power into the hands of the end users and allows them to bring data, which is most important for their business needs, into one centralized location. To fully understand what a self-service dashboard is, we need to start with the understanding of what a dashboard is.

A standard dashboard is a collection of graphical and numeric information all brought together on one screen or page. With IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, the idea has always been that it needs to be interactive data, or otherwise a dashboard loses some of its power. You may be asking yourself, how to interact with data? There are a few typically used ways of making a dashboard interactive. Drill-down, drill-through, links to the metrics, links to the other systems, hover-over, or comment capabilities are a few of the most commonly used techniques. The following is a brief overview of each:

The first thing to consider when creating a new dashboard is what data you want to have represented. At the end of the day, a dashboard is only as valuable as the information that it provides. So the first step is to determine what data is most relevant to the business question I am trying to answer. For the purposes of this book, I will be using the sample data of IBM Cognos, and I will be creating a sales dashboard.

When you first click on Create New, you will see a blank canvas that will show Drag objects from the content pane to the canvas to create a dashboard. You can also right-click an object to insert it at the center, as shown in the following screenshot:

The right-hand side of this screen contains the insertable content. There are a few areas to consider. The search area will allow you to search for content that may be relevant for your dashboard. You can also navigate the content. If you choose the drop-down arrow next to All Content, you will...

Filtering is a mechanism for limiting the data that is rendered in a report or a dashboard. A filter is going to remove the information that we do not need on our reports and only leave the information that is most relevant to us. Creating filters in Cognos Workspace is a straightforward process. The first step is to toggle from our Content pane to our Toolbox.

The Cognos Workspace toolbox contains additional objects that can be added to a dashboard besides the content. They are:

Next, we will look at changing the formatting of our content. There are two common formatting changes that we can make: color schemes and chart types. Each of our charts have similar color schemes, but these might not be the color schemes that we want to use. If we hover over one of our charts, we will see the following toolbar appear above it:

As you will notice, some of the options are grayed out for charts. These options are available when working with lists. The following are the options that you will have for working with your content:

The first and most important step for sharing a dashboard is creating it and making it fit a common business need. So far, we have looked at creating the content and customizing our dashboard. Now we can look at adding comments and saving our dashboard to a shared location for others to access it. We can finish a dashboard by saving it to a public location and adding comments to any of the objects that we think need an explanation. I will save our report and put a comment on the edited chart to explain why I changed it. This comment can contain whatever information we think is pertinent for sharing with the other users.

The comment is shown in the following screenshot:

Then, when a future user opens this dashboard, they can hover over the chart and see my note. By saving the dashboard in public folders, you are able to allow others to access it and share the information that you created.

In addition to having the ability of being saved, the dashboard can be e-mailed...

This section sounds like a catchy name of a webinar or a clever marketing campaign. However, there really is a strong business case for Cognos Workspace. This product was purpose-built for the business users and relies on the business users to drive the acceptance of it.

As we have discussed, Cognos Workspace is all about empowering the business user. The simplest business case for this product is the ability of someone in the business to now design and build their own dashboard without IT support. This alone is a pretty powerful capability. What I would like to do though is move beyond the business case to how you and I can drive user adoption.

The easiest way to drive user adoption is from the top down, and with Cognos Workspace it is easy to gain attention from the top. When you think of dashboards, the most common type of dashboard in businesses is the executive dashboard. What I would propose as the best way to drive user adoption through an organization...

Cognos Workspace is a new tool for Cognos Business Intelligence that allows the end users to develop and share their dashboards. The product is designed to make it easy for the end users to choose the data that is most important to them and to consolidate it in one location. In Cognos Workspace, you can customize the color schemes of your objects and change the chart type of your charts. You can also add comments and share the reports. Cognos Workspace makes it easy for the users to access the information on their own without having to create their own queries. In short, it is the perfect tool for power-end users that know the information they want but do not have an understanding of the underlying data.

In the next chapter, we will look at another end-user interface called IBM Cognos Active Reports for interacting with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence data.