InetSoft Product Information: How to Build Adaptive Dashboards

Adaptive business dashboards are essential when it comes to organizing large quantities of information. In general, there are many data records that correspond to a given row and column heading in the crosstab table. The values of the measures for these records must therefore be aggregated to yield the single scalar value that appears at a given row-column intersection. The aggregation method specified by the ‘Aggregate’ menu determines the way in which this summarization is done.

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Aggregation Example

In this configuration:

• Row dimension is ‘Customer’ (a region/state hierarchy)

• Column dimension is ‘Product’ (a category/product name hierarchy)

• Measure is ‘Quantity Purchased’.

The ‘Aggregate’ menu specifies ‘Sum’, which indicates that each value in the crosstab table will represent the sum of ‘Quantity Purchased’ taken over all records matching the given row and column headings. Thus, for the row heading ‘USA East’ and the column heading ‘Business’, the summary value of the measure shown in the crosstab table represents the total quantity of all ‘Business’ category products purchased by ‘USA East’ region customers.

In the same way, if we set the ‘Aggregate’ menu to ‘Max’, then the summary value shown in the crosstab table for the above row and column combination would represents the maximum quantity of ‘Business’ category products purchased by any ‘USA East’ region customer.

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InetSoft Viewpoint

"I think what we’ve seen with our customers is that they approach this from two different angles. They either have a BI strategy in place, and we’ve worked with many customers that use Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion, etc. They have this business intelligence platform in place whereby they’re gathering the data across their enterprise and across their systems.

It spans applications and databases where all the information comes from. They are looking to, as I said before, put the processes in context. The second approach we find is that they are putting a BPM, a process strategy in place. The follow-on to that is sometimes the business intelligence strategy. So we find them coming from each side of the coin. Now the important thing that we have seen with our customers is that the reality for them is that the process improvement aspect – whether they are coming at it from the process improvement side to begin with, or they already have the BI solution in place, and now they’re trying to put them in context – is that a lot of those projects are stalled by the legacy of past failed projects, the lack of concrete requirements, especially from business owners. There is a lack of collaboration between IT and business to get accurate requirements in place in a quick manner to adjust to changing business conditions.

Now we’re seeing, as always, IT budgets aren’t getting bigger. They’re getting smaller, and folks are naturally defaulting to their existing systems and infrastructure for their new projects. So you look at existing systems they have in place, they don’t match the way their people are using them right now. And we all know that any system that has reached the capital expenditure committee has some sort of workflow, or at least they say they do." - Luke Liang, CEO, InetSoft

More Resources:

		Dashboard Product Information
		What Makes a Good Ad Hoc Reporting Solution?
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		Advantages of Visual BI Software