Saturday 1 December 2012

How to use Dashboards in Business Intelligence Applications

What a dashboard is?

Dashboard is the most important component in business intelligence. A dashboard can have one or more pages that are identified by unique titles on top of each page. The basic function of a dashboard is to display personalized views of information extracted from different data sources. By personalized I mean different views for different set of users.Dashboard pages display this information in a web browser using BI components such as analyses results, action links and menus, alerts, BI Publisher reports and more.

This section of the book, Implement Oracle Business Intelligence, creates the main page of Imports Management Information dashboard. As shown in the figure below, it presents five different graphical views to answers the first five questions asked by Mr. Frank - the Imports department head. This is the first page that he browses after successfully logging in to his dashboard.

In addition to providing information in graphical format on the main page, you are also guided on how to create a separate dashboard page named Data to display actual data behind these graphs in the form of tables for each question.  



A. Future Payments: This information will be presented using the ticker view that displays the results as a ticker or marquee, similar in style to the stock tickers that run across many financial and news sites on the Internet.

B. Shipment Tracking: This section holds information about the in-transit shipments to keep their track.

C. Product Category Volume: Provides the import volume information about the three categories the company deals in.

D. Import Volume: Shows annual comparative imports volume.

E. Product Volume – Current vs. Last Year: The Category Volume section displays cumulative information for each category. This section contains volume information for each individual product.

F. Detail Links: Text links are created using the Action Link Object. You can see one each in the four sections above. Clicking these links will allow the user to get to the details (data table) of the presented graphical information.