Fast-Track Your Way to Creating Effective BI Reports and Dashboards

Susan Joly

@e2valpo

March 13, 2015

Fast-Track Your Way to Creat ing Effect ive BI Reports and Dashboards 1

Overview .................................................................................................................................................................................. 2

I want it now! .......................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Serve yourself ......................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Easily create reports with the Publisher module ........................................................................................................... 4

Easily create dashboards with the Dashboards module ............................................................................................. 4

Fast tempo ............................................................................................................................................................................... 5


Overview Central to every solid business intelligence (BI) solution is a platform with easy-to-use functionality that meets vast user needs,

along with the governance, security, and scalability that enterprises require. Ultimately, it is the voice and testimonial of the

customers who are using a given platform that speak volumes.

The Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, conducted annually, was recently published on February 23,

2015. In this research, BI and analytics platform vendors were evaluated based on key customer-survey metrics from 2,083 BI

platform users. The research also highlights marketplace trends, innovations, and forecasts.

This series of articles explores elements that are critical to an effective BI solution, and highlights what we believe Pyramid

Analytics offers in this regard. We heard input from our customers about strengths in Pyramid Analytics’ BI Office platform for

large-scale, governed BI related to the following areas:

Enterprise-grade, end-to-end BI platform—for instance, ability to quickly create a vast range of reports and dashboards,

governed data discovery, analysis capabilities, ease of use, platform integration, metadata management

Successful, large-scale, governed BI programs—for instance, versatile range of dashboards, reporting, and analysis

capabilities, mobile BI

Users at ease with practical business gains— high customer satisfaction, high degree of business benefits achieved

For more information, read the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms.

I want it now! The rhythm of business seems to be constantly in an accelerated state.

In today’s BI world, there is increased pressure to provide business value and results rapidly and efficiently. To help users keep up

with an accelerated pace and pressure to deliver, BI products must have functionality that can quickly and easily produce results.

As noted in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms:

“Growing business user requirements for ease of use, support for users to conduct complex types of analysis, and a fast

time to business benefits are not being well met by vendors that own a large, IT centric installed base market share.”


And this is not just about user roles such as, say, data scientists in a company, or those who work in the IT department. There is an

increasing market need to offer BI capabilities to a broad range of users. The following roles, for instance, have different day-to-

day responsibilities, but are all in some form reliant on products that show them in their best light by enabling fast results.

http://www.pyramidanalytics.com/pages/resources/analytics-reports/gartner-2015-magic-quadrant-business-intelligence-analytics-platforms.aspx



Role Responsibility

Business analysts, BI analysts, report analysts

Although these roles might use IT-provisioned data and reporting, they still want certain freedom--for instance, the ability to merge data sources, create hierarchies, create custom calculations, and control report formats.

Business decision makers, such as CEO, vice president of sales, finance manager, clinical director

These roles depend on data from their business analysts and developers as the basis for taking action, and making and defending their decisions. They might decide to promote a certain product and reduce production of another one; they might allocate more or fewer resources to an area. The list is endless. They need data quickly, for relevant and timely decisions.

Non-technical users, data consumers

These types of users don’t necessarily need to create BI content; they’re more interested in viewing and examining it to form insights that they can then share with others on their team or in their organization. They want to access reports within days, for instance, and to get quick answers to questions.

These are just a few types of users who require fast results. Data consumers and business end users who are responsible for providing fact-based guidance to the decision-makers on their team are all part of a broader range of roles who need ease of use in their tools to gather and report on data, form insights, and deliver business benefits quickly.

Pyramid Analytics is an enterprise-grade BI platform, regarded for its performance, ease of use, and end-to-end functionality. It’s also web-ready, and produces fast results.

Customer feedback has also highlighted the short time it takes to develop reports and dashboards, ranging from simple to complex.

Serve yourself Along with a platform that delivers quick results for a broad range of users and needs, self-service data preparation is another important element, or trend, that is driving vendor selection and success. Also, one of the most important trends in BI currently is the self-service dashboard. The trend toward self-service BI is anticipated to be further and further engrained in organizational culture for the immediate

short-term, as well as for the next few years to come, at the very least.

Let’s look at a prediction from a Gartner report, Predicts 2015: Power Shifts in Business Intelligence and Analytics Will Fuel

Disruption, about self-service data preparation.

"By 2017, most business users and analysts in organizations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis."*

As also reported in Predicts 2015: Power Shifts in Business Intelligence and Analytics Will Fuel Disruption:

"Self-service data integration will do for traditional IT-centric data integration what data discovery platforms have done for traditional IT-centric BI: reduce the significant time and complexity users face in preparing their data for analysis (as much as 80% of the overall analytics development effort), and shift much of the activity from IT to the business user to better support governed data discovery."*

With self-service data preparation, rather than the IT department entirely preparing, managing, and delivering content, business users and analysts have much more liberty and ability to serve themselves.


This distribution benefits both IT and business users. Those in the IT department can enable business users to perform certain tasks, which then frees up IT to perform other tasks. Business users and analysts get to interact with the data independently, apply calculations, generate results, and share these results with their team. Data consumers get quicker access to timely data to help them examine it, ask relevant questions, and generate insights. From advanced analytics to data consumption, self-service BI fosters agility and relevance.

Pyramid Analytics addresses both the need for users to perform tasks quickly, but also the trend toward self-service BI. Part of what makes it quick and easy to develop reports and dashboards is the intuitive interface of Pyramid Analytics’ BI Office Suite and its Publisher module and Dashboards module.

With BI Office, it’s also easy to drag and drop, for quick and easy distribution of reports that are carefully formatted, and that display data that’s integrated from many sources.

Easily create reports with the Publisher module With the Publisher module in BI Office, you can publish and distribute the information provided by your BI systems in a way that

integrates with your company's work processes. Every user can design and share reports - individual or by the thousands - quickly

and intuitively.

The following are some of the features and functionality available for easily creating reports:

Point-and-click design – Interact with an intuitive user interface in a Microsoft Office-like environment.

Smart reports with conditional formatting – Automatically highlight exceptional data.

Formula and logic wizard-based designers – Generate and re-use formulas and logic.

Built-in security – Integrate permissions for users, including editing and viewing abilities.

Template design – Design templates to share and control formatting and output, so that it has a uniform look and feel across the organization.

Collaboration capabilities – Collaborate; share reports across the organization.

Auto-generate alerts and reports according to predefined events, dates, and triggers.

Easily create dashboards with the Dashboards

module With this module in BI Office, data discovery and analytics workflow are interactive and intuitive. The module is basically a personalized BI platform, yet has an enterprise-level BI infrastructure. The following are some of the features and functionality available for easily creating dashboards:

Intuitive browser-based user experience – Intuitively design dashboard slides for presentation and distribution.

Interactions between the dashboard panels – Create instant relationships between elements by using graphics tools.

Rich visualization – Get fully interactive charts, grids, gauges, and geospatial maps that provide one-click connectivity back to the Dashboards module.

Global slicers and variables – Drag and drop slicers into the dashboard designer to centrally control one or several dashboard elements in one or more dashboard pages.

Create once, deploy everywhere – Dashboards are automatically available over desktop, browser, and mobile. There’s no need to re-create them for all the modalities where they’re consumed.


Fast tempo The days of data-based decisions are fully upon us. Data must be available quickly for all types of users, so it can be readily

consumed, analyzed, and shared, culminating in timely, smart business decisions.

Research from the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms corroborates the growing need for

delivering quick business benefits, and we feel shines a spotlight on the trend of moving away from an IT-centric focus.

With a self-service platform that enables quick creation of reports and dashboards, your organization can keep up with an

accelerated beat.


*Gartner, Predicts 2015: Power Shifts in Business Intelligence and Analytics Will Fuel Disruption. Josh Parenteau, Neil Chandler, Rita

L. Sallam, Douglas Laney, Alan D. Duncan, 21 Nov. 2014

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those

vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should

not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of

merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.


Fast-Track Your Way to Creating Effective BI Reports and Dashboards

Data & Analytics

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