Everything at a glanceReporting and dashboards for decision-makers With 6 tips for creating dashboards

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In what direction should innovation be driven? What gaps in the market are most lucrative? Which products will ensure our success over the next few years? Busi-ness Intelligence (BI) reporting and analytics tools can find the answers to such questions and also form the basis for creating quarterly and annual reports. They continuously provide management with relevant decision-making information – in particular, ad hoc evaluations that help support important, time-sensitive business issues.

By using BI tools, important data and parameters, for example, can be summa-rised and used for effective business reporting. Dashboards can be built so that key metrics are always visible and available, while trend comparisons highlight important developments that management can use for a variety of purposes.

Using a graphical and interactive user interface, Pentaho Dashboards provide business users with the required key performance indicators for analysing and increasing company performance. Reports can be created using the web-based Dashboard Designer, which also supports drag and drop management.

Sophisticated and visually appealing Dashboards can also be realised using Pen-taho Ctools. Using free form design layouts, individual customer requirements can be quickly and easily realised. Dashboards, ad hoc queries and OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) are common descriptive analytics tools.

Marketing Dashboard with analytics of website traffic

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In the past, many companies have invested considerable sums of money in these traditional forms of Business Intelligence. But there was a noticeable change in the use of analytics: Development in the direction of Predictive Analytics (What is going to happen?) and Prescriptive Analytics (What must we do to ensure that a certain thing happens?) significantly gained traction with companies.

Self-Service ReportingSelf-service BI is a concept that has been spreading throughout the Business Intelligence industry since 2010. In a nutshell, it is an IT environment where users are able to undertake analyses and create reports on their own, completely inde-pendent of the IT department. Because independently processing and interpre-ting data can save time, the self-service principle is particularly useful when users regularly make decisions and need to react quickly.

For anyone who wants to use corporate information properly, this data must be displayed in an easily accessible manner. And a good way of doing this is by using Dashboards. The technology used to create and manage Dashboards and reports is based on the community tool CTools, a collection of open source-based tools for data processing.

Develop and distribute reportsFinding hidden costs, analysing markets, creating business reports: To be able to carry out analyses and reporting functions, companies need Business Intelligen-ce. Pentaho provides different reporting functions that range from interactive, self-service reports to formatted standard reports. Pentaho Interactive Reporting also provides users with a web-based, drag-and-drop interface so they can create ad hoc reports. Using the Pentaho Report Designer, high-resolution reports can be implemented and distributed in a variety of formats to recipients throughout the company.

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Dashboards provide a centralised view of important informationManagers and decision makers expect quick and intuitive access to business-cri-tical information so that they can focus on really important issues and make business-critical decisions faster. Using Business Intelligence tools (BI tools), graphical data views – Dashboards – can be created that enable users to instant-ly see relationships, trends and outliers at a glance. Dashboards pull together company information from a variety of data sources and provide graphical and tabular data analyses with a high degree of density. This, in turn, allows users to process ad hoc queries on the company‘s current economic situation. it-novum supports customers in optimising standard reporting systems (e.g. in accordance with International Business Communication Standards (IBCS)), which ensures consistent visualisations.

Using the Pentaho Dashboard Designer, users can create and manage their own Dashboards. This allows the viewer to be quickly and intuitively informed about any given situation. System functionality varies depending on the version of Pen-taho being used. Those using the Enterprise Edition have the ability to indepen-dently put together cockpits in an interface using the Dashboard Designer.

Implementation after the IBCS® in a CDE dashboard by Pentaho

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Your benefits with Pentaho Dashboards ▶ Customised, automated company-wide information distribution

▶ Knowledge gains through linked information from different sources

▶ Reduction in manual effort required for reporting

▶ Ad hoc reporting using innovative web interfaces

▶ Dashboards show central KPIs at a glance

▶ Reports and Dashboards can be used on mobile devices

▶ User interfaces for designing reports require no previous IT knowledge

How to create dashboards

In a decade characterised by almost overwhelming floods of data, being able to correctly visualise information is of key importance. Information can only be correctly perceived and interpreted if it is correctly displayed.

A well-designed dashboard facilitates the assimilation of information

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Dashboards are a form of graphical representation in which data is aggregated and visualised. There are many tools and solutions for accomplishing this, both in the proprietary and open source spaces (Pentaho dashboards created with CTools were used for the images used here). Dashboards help to display infor-mation in an appealing and easily readable way. Although these solutions have evolved considerably in recent years, you need to consider more than just the right technology when creating dashboards.

Although it may sound rather banal, it‘s still valid – and more important than ever before when you consider the constantly increasing amounts of information we have to deal with: Data must be visualised in such a way that it‘s impossible to in-terpret it incorrectly. This takes more than just good software; profound knowled-ge of data visualisation is also required.

To begin with, you need a well laid out diagram specifically designed for the tar-get group that will be reviewing it. How the information is prepared and display-ed depends on the group receiving it. For example, company management needs data prepared differently than the controlling or sales departments.

6 tips for effective dashboards1. Choose the right visualisation method „Last year we sold 135,411 wipers, this year 142,718.“ Sentences like this don‘t belong in a dashboard because they‘re too hard to understand. The same applies to complex tables, many individual pieces of data or texts, because they confuse the viewer and should therefore be visualised using diagrams. Diagrams enable the viewer to grasp important data at a glance. They also ensure that the dash-board appears clear and tidy. However, you need to be careful: not all diagrams are equally suitable and some traditional diagrams are used today in a modified form, as this makes them easier to read.

2. Ensure your dashboard has high information density Ensure your dashboard fills the entire screen and contains all your important diagrams. Your data should sit firmly in the foreground – background images such as photos or decorative elements only distract from what is important. Pie charts should be used carefully because they make it difficult to compare large quan-tities of a similar size. They are also only really suitable for displaying a limited number of categories (<6).

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3. Display content simply 3D diagrams may look good, but they are not as easy to read as traditional diagrams. It is therefore best to leave them out completely. Data visualisations should be designed in such a way that the information presented can be inter-preted simply and unambiguously. You should therefore leave out elements such as animations if they have no intrinsic meaning. You should also use colours sensibly. A narrow range of colours (e.g. grey tones), good contrasts and colours that support the statement being made (green = positive, red = negative, blue = highlighting, etc.) are recommended. Be very careful with bright colours: They are usually noticed instead of the information and can thus lead to a false perception of the data. If you want to highlight certain information, define which colour you would like to use for this within your colour palette (e.g. blue).

4. Choose the right comparison type Every statement about data contains some sort of comparison. Not all data vi-sualisations are read in the same way, so how they are displayed and arranged is decisive. Here, you can make good use of standard visual hierarchies: For instan-ce, we automatically read time units from left to right. Time sequences (days, months, years) thus always belong on the X-axis. Structures such as products, however, should be arranged on the Y-axis.

Recommendations for using colours in diagrams and dashboards

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5. Enable comparisons Make it easier to compare diagram contents by using appropriate contrasts, sha-pes or auxiliary elements (visual support). The aim here is to recognise patterns and perceive values and quantities in the right proportion. You can compare everything, and it is easier to interpret sorted bars than unsorted ones. This is an important consideration, because it is easy for information to „fall through the cracks“.

6. Use a uniform appearance Your dashboard should have a consistent design. You should therefore ensure that all elements are standardised, for example, by using a symbol for all target values. Also, create a concept for all fonts and colours used. This will make your dashboard look clearer and more professional. The same or similar content should not be displayed with different diagrams, as this will only confuse the viewer.

Creating a good dashboard with the right visualisations is certainly not something you can do in an hour. But with thought and consideration of the data to be displayed, it can be achieved. Here is an example of a well-designed dashboard:

Example of a well-designed dashboard

Why you should speak with it-novum... We are leveraging these business intelligence and big data benefits to businesses:

▶ 360-degree view of your customers ▶ Specialist departments evaluate Big Data data themselves thanks to self-service analytics ▶ Identification of new revenue sources through intelligent use of company data ▶ Cost savings through the use of a data warehouse ▶ Avoiding the time-consuming and error-prone Excel mess

If you want to use these benefits in your business, we should get to know each other!

it-novum offers extensive services for your big data analytics project:

▶ Data engineering ▶ Implementation of data warehouses and data lakes ▶ Pentaho/SAP Connector for processing SAP data ▶ Pentaho/HVA Connector for video stream analytics ▶ Predictive analytics and machine learning ▶ Dashboards and data visualization ▶ Embedded analytics

Leading in Business Open Source solutions and consulting

it-novum is the leading IT consultancy for open source based business solutions in the German- speaking market. We operate from our main office in Fulda and branch offices in Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Vienna and Zurich to serve medium and large enterprises as well as the public sector.

As Hitachi Vantara Preferred Partner for Big Data Insights and IoT we are experts in using Pentaho. With our expertise in consulting, training and support we help companies to generate insights from their data and to make their data-driven projects successful

Your contact person for Business Intelligence and Big Data: Stefan Müller Director Big Data Analytics stefan.mueller@it-novum.com +49 (0) 661 103 942

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Andreas Kuhn Sales Manager Big Data Analytics andreas.kuhn@it-novum.com +49 (0) 661 103 363

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