Introduction

An enterprise dashboard is a user interface for visualizing enterprise information that is carefully designed to help get a bird’s eye view of key system parameters at just a glance. Even today, many organizations create dashboards using a combination of software and manual processes. It is not uncommon for people to generate reports from disparate MIS applications and manually integrate them into a spreadsheet to generate pivot tables and charts, and finally convert that into a PDF document or as a presentation for discussion. Many enterprise applications are accessed via a browser interface today, and ideally developers would also like to incorporate dashboards right within their application context. However, traditional Web technologies cannot provide the kind of visualizations and interactions that users want, and therefore many applications end up providing ‘reports’ as opposed to dashboards.

With the advent of Web 2.0 it is possible to deliver a very rich experience even within the browser, thanks to RIA technologies. It is no surprise that even business users want a similar seamless, interactive, and rich experience for their enterprise applications. Today, users want to interact with the data that sits behind these reports in a variety of ways. Whether it is drilling through the summary level information to get details, or analyzing the data with other pivot dimensions, or performing ‘what if’ analyses collaboratively with co-workers over the Web, dashboards are no longer a mere visualization tool that is the fancy of a manager or an executive.

Rich enterprise dashboards are all about presenting the right information in an impacting way. It is possible to build such engaging dashboards with the RIA technology offerings available in the market today.

Technology Requirements of a Typical Rich Enterprise Dashboard