Author: Joe Rodriguez
Analytics Dashboards have been an integral corporate BI strategy as they are used to present key performance indicators (KPI) in an actionable, visual framework. Traditional dashboard views comprise gauges, levers, pie charts, bar charts, and other visuals of the sort that represent measurement of key business data. While traditional views continue to serve a valuable business purpose, new interactive visualizations have emerged that further enrich business insight and are portrayed in visuals that better represent the intrinsic characteristics of the data.
For example, a Bubble Chart could better represent KPIs encompassing metrics that are better visualized in comparison to one another based on the size and color of its bubble.
Or a Tree Map can represent different entities comparatively and as different colored segments within each entity, where the color is associated with the metric.
IBM Cognos customers can download advanced, interactive visualizations to match their data from IBM’s Analyticszone web site at this link: https://www.analyticszone.com/homepage/web/visualizationsDownload.action
Another source for visualization examples shared by visualization experts and practitioners is IBM’s Many Eyes community: http://manyeyes.com/software/analytics/manyeyes/ . Here you can review and interact with a variety of visualizations that may give you an idea for your own specific business need.
The underlying technology behind these advanced visualizations is IBM’s Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE). RAVE is a declarative language that provides a flexible way to create visual mappings by describing what the visualization should look like, without having to write any tedious rendering code.
“The interactive visualization technology advancement for analyzing complex data is deployed 66% of the time and extensively used by 34% of surveyed organizations versus 31.8% in 2012. Interactive visualization has become the fifth most widely deployed of the 15 BI and analytics platform capabilities and continues to grow as companies give business users greater autonomy to conduct more advanced types of analysis” (Source: Gartner, July 2013)
FYI Solutions is a Premier IBM Business Partner that can help you to expand your dashboard strategy and capabilities with new advanced interactive visualization.
