Keith Gile Quotations

The dashboard needs to deliver data in a timely fashion, and that timeliness is dictated by which process is being represented in the dashboard.

When built properly with effective use of graphics and information objects, dashboards deliver targeted data 'in context' to the business workers, allowing these workers to make better, more timely business decisions. A good, effective dashboard application will save the business workers time, and that is the key reason why dashboards are gaining in popularity.

They serve very different audiences. But if you bring the two together onto a single platform, then your reporting solution could potentially leverage some of the metadata or integration capabilities that are in the analytic tool.

For instance, a dashboard showing traffic flow in a train or bus terminal needs to reflect data that is changing every minute, whereas a dashboard showing average deal size by sales rep for a retailer may only require daily or weekly updates. The process dictates the requirement for real-time updates or real-time data access.

By exposing more functions with Web services, they're making it easier for their products to fit in with SAP and Oracle and IBM applications. So you can pull your BI pieces from wherever you want. That's a fundamental change from three or four years ago.

A good, effective dashboard application will save business workers time, and that is the key reason why dashboards are gaining in popularity.