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.

Operational dashboards

Track core operational processes with continuous data refreshes.

Benefits:

• Monitor operational processes as they happen.
• Get immediate visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) for corrective action and rapid decision-making.
• Enable exception-based decisions with alerts.
• Provide links to associated reports.
• Self-serve authoring & editing.

Tactical dashboards

Run against data marts or data warehouses to track departmental processes and projects.

Benefits:

• Monitor performance on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
• Get visibility into performance of departmental activities, processes and projects.
• Integrate into your corporate portal or deploy as a standalone report.
• Drill-down or drill-through to reports and analysis for additional information or context.

Strategic dashboards/scorecards

Monitor execution of corporate strategic objectives at each level of the organization.

Benefits:

• Track progress against strategic corporate goals.
• Map key connections among departments and cause-and-effect relationships between or across departments.
• Support management methodologies including Balanced Scorecard, TQM, Six Sigma, etc.
• Drill-down to reports and analysis for additional information or context.