Business Insight or Report Studio

[cogcurious]

Where should we build Dashboards? I used to do it in report studio in version 8. But, i heard someone talk about dashboards being done through Business Insight

[MMcBride]

I am actually rebuilding most of my dashboards as Active Reports and delivering that way. You may want to look into Active Reports and see if they can meet your requirements.

From a Business Insight vs Report Studio there are several things to keep in mind.

Minor impact:
Business Insight is a different way of presenting the data, you can add Business Insight Dashboards as a Dashboard Tab within Cognos Connections but it is not 'built in' - I point this out because you mention "Dashboards", I have users that have access to multiple Report Studio based dashboards today that are built in Report Studio and accessable as tabs within their Cognos Connections environment.
Both tools can be used to deliver dashboards this way but you need to create an HTML object and embed the BI dashboard vs using a Cognos Report object.

Major impact:
Business Insight gives you much more power to allow users to customize their own dashboards, think reporting objects like widgets - this is a big improvement in dashboarding in general but if your users are used to looking at predefined dashboards and to ensure consistancy you don't want them to be able to change these dashboards that may be a reason to keep the dashboard as a Report Studio based version.
I tend to think the power of being able to build dashboard Objects and then allowing the end users to essentially subscribe to these seperate analytics is more of a true Dashboard but thats just my personal opinion.

Bottom Line:
There are reasons to continue to use Report Studio reports as dashboards but the reality of it is you are building a report with dashboard like qualities, to build a leverage a real dashboard you really need to deliver with Business Insight. There are quite a few good demonstrations of Dashboards utilizing Business Insight in the IBM marketing materials, they are worth at least a look.

At the beginning of this response I mentioned Active Reports
I am turning most of my current Dashboards into Active Reports, the primary reason is my consumers are comfortable with predefined dashboards and most currently do want the ability to change their dashboards - they want them fairly static (Static in look and feel with the ability to drill into a limited subset of data - with the ability to drill into deeper reports that contain the ultimate details) - Active reports can deliver the best of both worlds.
I can build static reports that gives alot more flash and wow factor while still keeping the basic content of the dashboard static.
I can also guarentee almost instant access to the information, my current Report Studio based dashboards when I prompts or filters causes the dashboards to load slower, using active reports I can deliver the same prompts and filters and get instant response times.
Remember this is a dashboard - when I want to do true drill down into more detailed information I simply provide the ability to launch other reports.

I haven't tried to drill straight from an Active report into a detailed RS report, so I don't know if that would work but providing links to other reports does work.

[ComplexQry]

Thank you for providing some perspective on Active Reports.  Prior to your post, I just didn't get very excited over these.  Primarily because what I wanted to see was an active report with a set of data, allowing me to use filters or objects to change the data I was looking out via charts.  But since I want charts re-rendered based on user interaction, these Active Reports are dependent upon Cognos Charting Engine and kills the potential of Active Reports.  Am I off base here?

[MMcBride]

Sorry I haven't gotten back sooner on this :)

I want charts re-rendered based on user interaction

This essentially happens in Active Reports as well. It just happens when you create the AR not when you run it

For example if you have a Chart you want to filter on year (using a simple example)
In Business Insight you build the chart - add a Slider based on year and you have it. When you move the slider the chart is re-rendered to reflect the change.

when you build the same basic dashboard as an Active report you can build the same chart - with a prompt for Year - when you build it the engine saves a version of the chart for every year selected so when you filter on year you are only viewing the chart built for that year.

the more prompts you have and the more data you have the larger your Active Report is going to be

But we are talking about Dashboards here, if I want 12 different prompts with 100 items in each prompt - this is a report, not a Dashboard Analytic in my opinion.

So you can get the same result with both options here.

The real benefit that I personaly see with Business Insight is I can Pre-build 20 Analytics and save them - then let the users build their own dashboards.
The irony I face though is that last sentance is exactly what the Business is trying to avoid. They want standard dashboards for specific teams that can't be modified only 'Filtered'

Written Premium vs Plan by Year will always be in the upper right corner, though you can filter by business unit and Product line for example.
For this I have found Active Reports to be a much better tool to use.

[Cognos8]

Hi Just want to bring my concern in BI and BIA in to this thread.   My report studio reports executes well, but when i drag and drop the report in busniess insight or expand the hierarchy performance is dead slow. have you ever faced performance issue and fine tuned anything?