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Reaping the Benefits of

Next GeNeratioN DashboarDs
The need for timely and succinct business intelligence (BI) continues to grow as executives demand critical information to seize opportunities faster than competitors and to address potential problems in the making. But increasingly, it is not just C-level executives and upper management who need access to business intelligence. Business unitmanagers and rank-and-file personnel increasingly must also have updated information to do their jobs. And in every case, users of business intelligence solutions desire a flexible and intuitive method for assimilating information without manually gathering data. The delivery mechanism must provide transparent connectivity and security to users, while presenting an easy to use interface fornavigating and consuming information. These requirements are driving the demand for a new generation of BI solutions.

A Need to overcome INflexIbIlIty
The old approaches for collecting, assimilating, and delivering BI information have not kept pace with today’s increasing demand for rapid decision-making and flexible information access requirements. A majority of organizations leverage staticreports and adhoc queries as primary methods for delivering business intelligence information, according to a 2007 CIO Insight survey of 215 senior business managers. These methods were found to be in use, respectively, by 81 percent and 67 percent of the managers in companies with revenues of $500 million or more. While a smaller percentage of organizations use dashboards and portals (62 percent and48 percent, respectively), most implementations of these tools lack the interactivity required for intuitive navigation and visualization of business data. Additionally, as information requirements and user demands increase, traditional BI solutions present obstacles and limitations that slow an organization’s ability to integrate business processes and strategy. In turn, this can hamperintelligent decision making in organizations today. A major challenge for organizations is the gap that some BI applications widen between IT and the business unit. While communication is difficult enough, some tools can also hinder what should be a collaborative process between business users, stakeholders, and developers who implement BI solutions. The inflexibility of many BI tools can lead to deployedsolutions that still fall short of business users’ expectations for addressing business problems. A careful implementation of technology that properly aligns to

Next geNeratioN dashboards:
• align business process with live data to provide business intelligence at all levels of an organization • use intuitive and easy to digest visuals for delivering information to busy executives • visualizeand navigate timely and accurate information


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business process or strategy is critical to the success, yet can easily be compromised based on technology choices.

SolutIoN: Next geNerAtIoN dAShboArdS
Faced with these challenges, organizations demand integrated and flexible business intelligence solutions that facilitate more timely and informed decisions. Next generationdashboards will solve these challenges, by introducing a robust entry point into business intelligence at all levels within an organization. The next generation of dashboards must: be easy to build and customize: While traditional dashboard projects required great amounts of custom coding, the next generation of dashboards empower nonIT professionals to design and connect business data to adashboard interface. This approach bridges the gap between IT and business intelligence users, allowing stakeholders to become proactive in the design process. Dashboard technology should be flexible, allowing an unlimited combination of controls for analyzing and navigating business data. Provide a consolidated view from any data source: Dashboards are only as useful as the data they present to the...