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Cognos Dashboard Creation

Business Intelligence

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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 beacted 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.

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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

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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 yourdrill through definitions the dashboard.

4. (optional) Create a new portal page to display the

dashboard in its own tab.

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Example

For my example we will use this audit dashboard

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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 withadditional drill throughs for more detail

Each graph is 200 x 200

pixels in a 3 by 2 table.

Report

Grouping

User Grouping

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Example

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Creating a Portal Tab

You now have this portal tab. You just have to

define the settings of each element.

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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.

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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.

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RSS Viewer

The RSS View just needs an

RSS url to display.

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Final Product

Html object

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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.