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Business Intelligence TipsRead these 107 Business Intelligence Tips in 12 categories ranging from Balanced Scorecard Reporting to Supply Chain Reporting. Each tip is approved by our Editors and created by expert writers so great we call them Gurus. LifeTips is the place to go when you need to know about Business Intelligence tips and hundreds of other topics. Become a Guru or Become an Advertiser. Seven Principles For Effective Visual Presentations In Performance Reporting - #6: Make The Most Important Information To Your Message More Visually Salient.Stephen Few, a respected IT innovator, consultant, and educator has studied the art and science of visual presentation for many years. In a White Paper prepared for Cognos Corporation, he presents seven principles for the effective display of quantitative information. The sixth of these is presented below: jobs by
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Competing Priorities: How Performance Management Reporting Can Help.Cognos.com Tip: A recurring dilemma in 21st century business involves finding ways to strike a balance among an organization's many competing priorities. Each corporate activity or function, e.g. marketing, operations, accounting, information, development, etc. presents myriad resource-intensive alternatives to meet challenges and exploit opportunities. Successful navigation of these waters is what separates high performing companies from the mundane. Performance management (including performance management reporting) encompasses systems, methodologies, metrics, processes includes performance management software technologies to identify ways to improve overall business performance. Accordingly, achieving enhanced performance across the breadth of corporate functions becomes very complex. This sets the stage for incorporation of BI tools and technologies, especially reporting software, throughout the enterprise to aid in the balancing process. Many business intelligence vendors offer enterprise solutions for reporting. When searching for technological help, information on executive and business dashboards and OLAP reporting may open the door. Seven Principles For Effective Visual Presentations In Performance Reporting - #5: Avoid Visual Connection Of Discrete Values Thus Creating False Relationships In The Data.Stephen Few, a respected IT innovator, consultant, and educator has studied the art and science of visual presentation for many years. In a White Paper prepared for Cognos Corporation, he presents seven principles for the effective display of quantitative information. The fifth of these is presented below: How Marketing Reporting Helps You Take The Pulse Of Your BusinessCognos.com Tip: The well-informed business manager uses many sources of information to keep up with trends, opportunities and pitfalls. Some of these are financial; many are technological; while still others are operational. Few sources of news are as pervasive and timely as your marketplace and a quality marketing department. Using your marketing department as an “early detection system” will provide you with timely information on how changing market conditions can indicate needs for new products and services. This can extend to improvements in sales strategies and corporate policy development. Carefully selecting what information is best used for this purpose is a natural for a good marketing department. Marketing reporting is the key and BI is the solution. Even a good marketing department must deal with reams of data that can only be gathered, analyzed, and reported in today's data-rich environment, through the judicious use of technology. For example, sudden reductions in demand for traditionally successful products or services could indicate competitor pressure, market shifts, and/or revenue trouble around the corner. In this example, the facts coupled with the marketing department's savvy can result in meaningful answers from a good business intelligence system. Use BI software techniques, like the executive dashboard, scorecards and reporting. They will provide management insight best suited to query systems for market news information, asking questions like: ·Opportunity: What is the profit opportunity? ·Competition: What are the competitive risks to achieving it? ·Product Direction: What is the long-term value? ·Price: What is it worth? ·Demand: How do we reach and communicate value to customers? Seven Principles For Effective Visual Presentations In Performance Reporting - #4: Visual Properties That Represent Values Should Accurately Correspond To The Actual Differences They Represent.Stephen Few, a respected IT innovator, consultant, and educator has studied the art and science of visual presentation for many years. In a White Paper prepared for Cognos Corporation, he presents seven principles for the effective display of quantitative information. The fourth of these is presented below: Business Reporting Software – Striving For A Common FoundationCognos.com Tip: The challenge to the community of BI vendors is how to connect the universe of disparate data and information to provide a common business view of your company's operations. You've invested in tracking all of the salient transactions for sales, supply, manufacturing, and the like, yet how do you pull it together? A simplistic, though easily understood, analogy is found in the trusty spreadsheet. Old timers that started using Excel, Oracle, Lotus, or other similar software remember the early days when a sheet was just that set of information. Then came sheet linking and multi-dimensional spreadsheets. Business reporting software performs a similar function with all of your company's sources of data, but on a much faster and larger scale. Selection of the proper business reporting software can reliably lead to more value from your data investment and permit you to take advantage of emerging business opportunities with the right data, appropriate refresh timeliness and delivery characteristics. Seven Principles For Effective Visual Presentations In Performance Reporting - #3: Use Lengths Or Other Dimensional Technique To Further Encode Quantitative Values In Graphs.Stephen Few, a respected IT innovator, consultant, and educator has studied the art and science of visual presentation for many years. In a White Paper prepared for Cognos Corporation, he presents seven principles for the effective display of quantitative information. The third of these is presented below: “Of the full set of preattentive attributes, a few are perceived quantitatively. By this I mean that we perceive differences between varying expressions of a visual property (for example, length, exhibited as long bars, short bars, medium-length bars, etc.) as greater than or less than one another. Apart from these preattentive attributes, those that are not perceived quantitatively are simply seen as different, such as the different hues of black, green, blue, orange, purple, and so on. Two of the preattentive attributes that are perceived quantitatively are also perceived with a fair amount of quantitative precision: length and 2-D position.” The Elements Of An Effective Business Intelligence Software SystemCognos.com Tip: Development of a corporate performance management capability using a business intelligence tool can be complex and resource intensive. In order to make the right decisions when selecting the vendor and software that will, arguably, change the company forever, understanding the basic elements that should be included is valuable. According to a 2006 white paper from the vendor Cognos, there are five key elements incorporated into their product suite: ·Scorecarding - Link initiatives and projects to strategy with metrics and strategy maps. Use the same scorecard metrics to drive enterprise planning software for integrated performance management. ·Analysis - Explore and analyze large volumes of data covering all dimensions of the business, whether stored in OLAP or dimensionally aware relational sources. ·Reporting - Create any type of report, for any user, with any data. ·Dashboards - Deliver Web-based dashboards with information from different data sources in a single visual report. Provide an at-a-glance snapshot of the business. ·Business event management - Business event management goes beyond the basic notification functionality provided in other products to automate the decision-making process, launch business processes, and integrate with Business Process Management (BPM). Where human intervention is required, through decision-process automation, event management notifies the people who are accountable and provides the relevant information they need to resolve the issue. Many vendors offer similar business intelligence tool groupings, both integrated (like Cognos) and tool-by-tool. Careful research will lead the procurement team in the enterprise planning necessary to acquire an effective system. Seven Principles For Effective Visual Presentations In Performance Reporting - #2: Avoid Displaying Meaningless Differences.Stephen Few, a respected IT innovator, consultant, and educator has studied the art and science of visual presentation for many years. In a White Paper prepared for Cognos Corporation, he presents seven principles for the effective display of quantitative information. The second of these is presented below: Seven Principles For Effective Visual Presentations In Performance Reporting - #1: Display Only That Which Is Relevant.Stephen Few, a respected IT innovator, consultant, and educator has studied the art and science of visual presentation for many years. In a White Paper prepared for Cognos Corporation, he presents seven principles for the effective display of quantitative information. The first of these is presented below: “Extraneous content not only wastes people's time, it makes it harder for them to get at the message. |
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