Performance Dashboards

Organizations are under constant pressure to make better, faster decisions. With diverse data sources and inefficient, time-consuming processes needed to turn this data into useful information, more and more organizations are turning to dashboards. Tools such as portals help organizations reach performance data wherever it resides, delivering it as real-time key performance indicators via personalized, portal-based dashboards. They also provide alerts and tools to help users take action at the greatest point of impact - before issues become critical.

Business dashboards communicate complex information quickly. They translate information from your various corporate systems and data into visually rich presentations using gauges, maps, charts and other graphical elements to show multiple results together.

IBM® Cognos® 8 BI delivers the full range of dashboards—operational, tactical, strategic—to help you monitor, measure and manage corporate performance.

You can deploy dashboards as a standalone application or as a core element of an enterprise business intelligence or performance management platform.

Information-rich, visually appealing displays

• Provide business users at every level receive the information they need to make better decisions that improve business performance.
• Communicate common business patterns and relationships: trends, rank, part-to-whole, deviation, correlation.
• Wide array of chart types (bar, line, gauge, scatterplot, maps) let you match the data to the display.
• Conditional formatting and exception highlighting draw users' attention to sub-par results and areas that need immediate attention.
• Aggregate data from disparate systems into a single view.
• Drill-down / drill-through to reports and analysis for additional information and context.
• Control when and how you receive critical information by creating personalized alerts, based on custom data conditions.
• A single architecture for viewing, querying, analyzing and authoring for collaborative contributions to any report or dashboard.
• Global dashboard filters let users seamlessly orchestrate changes across multiple objects in a portal page.

New in version 8.4: IBM Cognos 8 Go! Dashboard

Personalize your business intelligence environment with a simple-to-use Flash interface:

• Personalized dashboards inform users of current performance and trends.
• Drag-and-drop authoring engages you with your data.
• Access to expanded data sources keeps your decisions aligned with corporate goals.

Dynamic business intelligence

• Flash-based graphics let you build attractive, interactive dashboards quickly.
• Client-side data capture gives you near-instant response times to repeated queries and layout changes.

Personalized information

• Drag-and drop-interface lets you create dashboards on the fly; no need to wait for IT or search for existing content.
• Modular report creation lets you build dashboards using existing report elements.

Trusted data source

• Build your dashboards using trusted information.
• Use existing report elements for complete, consistent view of results.

based, helping ensure long-term interoperability and the preservation of existing IT investments.

Portals

What are portals?

Web portals allow people to interact with other people, applications, processes, documents and other content in a personalized and role-based fashion. In a day and age when information overload has become commonplace, portals allow context-relevant resources to be presented via common Web browsers, placing what you need to complete the job at hand at you fingertips, regardless of where you are.

Why a portal might be right for your organization

Many IT solutions provide needed functionality, but require you to learn a new way to work. Portals allow you to customize your work environment to your own needs, present resources in a consistent fashion, and can provide a personalized experience based upon your previous preferences or specific role within an organization.

In addition, portals can help organizations address the challenges inherent with ‘build your own’ Web solutions, such as:

• Finding it difficult to keep up with the pace of evolution and the demand of user communities
• Needing to reduce application development resources and time to market
• Wanting to optimize the allocation of scarce IT resources, skills and budgets

Every industry has unique needs

Collaborating with other care providers or providing patients with access to the latest information, creating long-term relationships with retail customers, ensuring public safety... Whether you work in healthcare, retail, government, or any number of other industries, what you do is unique, requiring unique solutions.

Portals help enable unique solutions to thousands of customers and tens of thousands of end users worldwide each and every day.

You know what you do... A portal can help you do it better.

From 'A'utomotive to System 'z'

All around the world, thousands of customers in nineteen different industries are using portals to help deliver exceptional user experiences, improved efficiencies, lower total cost of ownership, and faster time to value. Here are just a few examples:

• Automotive: Lamborghini and IBM Premier Business Partner Tecla accelerate time to value with IBM WebSphere Portal.
• Banking: HSBC leverages the capabilities of WebSphere Portal to help address the challenges facing today's retail banks.
• Healthcare: MedStar Health integrates applications and improves knowledge sharing with an IBM portal solution.
• Government: Australian Social Security Appeals Tribunal streamlines business processes using WebSphere Portal and IBM Lotus collaboration tools.
• Retail: Mark’s Work Wearhouse drives profits with realtime point-of-sale information.
• Transportation: RENFE, the Spanish national railway operator, uses Linux and WebSphere Portal on IBM System z to 'get on track'.

What do you need to do today?

Perhaps you’re a manager who needs to on-board a new employee, or a sales executive needing up-to-the-minute key performance indicators (KPIs) of your organization’s performance, or an employee or supplier needing to collaborate on a specific project… Wouldn’t it be nice if practically any need could be addressed via a consistent user interface that was also role-based and personalized?

IBM portals provide the ideal platform for addressing the needs of varied audiences, via accelerators that simply ‘snap-on’ and extend the capabilities of your portal implementation as needed. In addition, a wide range of IBM Premier Business Partner solutions and IBM services are available to further address your needs.

Different sized organizations have different needs

Day in and day out, portals provide people around the world with personalized, role-based access to what they need, when and where they need it. And portals can benefit practically any organization, regardless of industry, solution requirements... Or size.

Portals designed for small and medium businesses or departmental use should provide the out-of-the box functionality and ease of installation smaller organizations require, while also providing a growth path that can scale to the needs of practically any sized enterprise. Additionally, portals should support additional solutions that ‘snap on’ to address emerging business needs. They should be standards-