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Business Intelligence Dashboards

A dashboard can be thought of as a type of business cockpit. The dashboard can be corporate i.e. shared with several users or it can be personal for the consumption of the owner only. A dashboard usually provides an information summary of the corporate or user’s view of the world with hyperlinks to more detailed reports.

Corporate information can be consumed and shared through many different types of dashboard visualization. Examples of the information presented on a dashboard might be a list of KPIs, a balanced scorecard, a strategy map, alerts on statistical process charts, and data analytics.

Although a dashboard looks like a single component it will usually consist of several different components using widgets and reports integrated together seamlessly. An example of a canvas for building a dashboard is SAP BusinessObjects’ Dashboard Builder.

The most powerful dashboards are also designed to be interactive. In terms of SAP BusinessObjects they use an interactive dashboard tool known as Crystal Xcelsius (now renamed SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards). Once the Xcelsius Dashboard has been created it can become one of the many components on the main dashboard. When Xcelsius is combined with Query as a Web Service the data can be refreshed at the click of a button.

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Team

Russell Beech, Founder of BI System Builders & Cornerstone Solution®

I architect data solutions and superintend the solutions that I architect. I build teams that are usually a mix of full-time employees and sub-contractors. I ensure mentoring and knowledge transfer. The emergence of big data has opened the door to a rise in interest in predictive analytics aka machine learning. The technology changes have provided the opportunity to architect data solutions which combine enterprise data warehousing experience with data lake concepts and to apply knowledge of statistics to that data to deliver predictive analytics. To that end I’m putting effort into understanding how the evolving technologies hook in to each other. I have a focused interest in big data technologies especially on the Google Cloud Platform. Technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, Apache Beam, BigQuery and Tensorflow (machine learning) and their integration/virtualization with the enterprise data warehouse.

You can find me on LinkedIn here and subscribe to watch BI System Builders videos on our YouTube channel here.

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Xcelsius Dashboards

Xcelsius provides visually impressive and interactive presentations. Xcelsius is a powerful presentation tool that bridges the gap between static spreadsheets and the need for visual, interactive presentations.

Xcelsius software illuminates the business by providing consolidated views of key metrics, making it possible to answer business questions at-a-glance. It allows users to interact with their data with what-if scenarios and other visual components.

With Xcelsius, the user can create dashboards for personal use – Xcelsius provides the power to transform complex data into a comprehensive dashboard created from Microsoft Excel or a live data source. The dashboard can then be exported to a familiar format – Microsoft Office, Flash (SWF) files, Adobe PDF, and Adobe Air.