Sunday, April 19, 2009

OBIEE The final skills, Creating great dashboards.

Most project we spend 70% on getting the data (ETL), 20% on creating the repository and 10% percent on creating the dashboards. Regarding step 1 and 2 most of us have enough skills do them successfully. The final step, creating the dashboard, is something we often take to light hearted.

Let's make a bold statement here: 60% percent of the dashboards we create, within six months, aren't used in the way we intended them or even worse aren't used at all.

Why? Most of them don't communicate to user in the most effective way. The user can't find what he is looking for at glance. Either we tend to overload him with data or present it in a non effective way.

If you want to master these last skills you should really read :

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few. (http://www.amazon.com/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-Communication/dp/0596100167)

The current version of OBIEE has the (dis)advantage that it doesn't have many charting options. This means we have put in some extra toughts in the way we put the data on the dashboards.

In comming period I will post some examples how the findings of Stephen Few can be implemented within OBIEE.

Till Next Time

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you think that the coming new version of BI Suite will have better charting capabilities?

John Minkjan said...

I don't 10.3.4.1 will have a lot more graphical possibilitys, you will have to wait untill 11g

regards

john

Karthikeyan said...

Hi John,

I m working in OBIEE technology. Recently I updated rowcount in my Admin server and saved the changes. But I m not able to see the fresh data in my final dasboard. The charts I used in the report is not working giving the No Data error but other section in the report is giving the data for some date as my conditional field.May I know what I need to do?

John Minkjan said...

Hi Karthikeyan,

Did you try fluhsing the cache?
Regards

John
Ps: Please post no article related questions here:
http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/04/obiee-questions.html

Karthikeyan said...

Hi John,
Thanks for your reply. I Flushed the cache but still I m getting the same error.I too checked the jobs and nqsconfig.ini file for seeing the query.everything is working but I couldnt find the data in the dashboard. Please help me regard this.

Anonymous said...

Hi John,

Do you know any good sites that show best practices and lessons learn for OBIEE? Additionally, what are books that have helped you with OBIEE and BI in general?

-Jake

Anonymous said...

Hi John,
I have a question on data label in chart. How can we change the background color for data labels or set no background color. right now i see data labels in little white square box.

John Minkjan said...

@Jake

Check my bloglist.

John Minkjan said...

@Anonymous

Have a look here:
http://obiee101.blogspot.com/2009/04/obiee-opaque-data-labels-on-charts.html

regards

John

Anonymous said...

Thank you it works!