When it comes to business intelligence and data analysis, IBM Cognos Analytics is an AI-infused powerful tool that, among other features, offers two distinct functionalities: reporting and dashboarding. In this blog, we'll delve into the world of Cognos Analytics and explore the key commonalities and differences between reporting and dashboarding. We'll examine the strengths and limitations of each feature and provide guidance on when to use each.

Both features are built on robust, trusted data governance and security to ensure everyone works with one centralized source of truth. Robust governance is a bedrock and a very strong capability within IBM Cognos Analytics, and centralization ensures everyone uses the same data for all capabilities. Cognos governance allows you to customize permissions and manage how your teams access and use the data and analytics to ensure everyone has access according to their needs.  

What are dashboards?

Dashboards are primarily designed to answer a central question or a set of questions and provide a quick overview or high-level view of data when the numbers are relatable or on a similar scale. All these things should be considered when building a dashboard. They are characterized by a user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface for creating data visualizations.

However, dashboards have their downsides. They are less flexible than reports, so they may not effectively accommodate particular data requirements or detailed analyses. Users may find that dashboards need more depth for thorough investigation or specialized interactions with the data. Cognos Analytics provides several ways to share dashboards with others, both within and outside your organization. Methods to share Cognos Analytics dashboards are link sharing, publishing on a portal, or embedding in a web page. The recipient must have the necessary permission to access it. For free access needs, it can be shared in PDF or image format.

Dashboards are a starting point leading to reports to delve into detailed information

What are reports?

On the other hand, business or enterprise reporting aims to generate both quick insight and detailed and structured outputs that meet specific requirements and allow its distribution to an unlimited number of internal and external users. An example of an external report is an individual monthly invoice sent to all customers. An example of an internal would be a weekly summary of product sales sent to all executives on Monday morning.

Reporting is essential when you need to create very specific content—whether that’s in a large amount of detail, in a very particular format, or because it involves specialized interactions. This allows for in-depth analysis and provides a comprehensive view of the data that dashboards often cannot achieve.

Users can define additional parameters to allow users to cater information for different needs with a single report by allowing them to slice information. This level of control enables more tailored insights, making reporting invaluable for complex data analysis and decision-making processes. While reporting is a more powerful authoring tool, it does come with the trade-off of requiring more effort and time to create custom reports.

Reports are designed to provide detailed intelligence on an organization's operations. They can cover a broad scope of related information or focus on specific details of a single item, purpose, or event. Reports can be embedded in customers’ portals and customized with custom JavaScript.

• Reports contain detailed information: Reports provide in-depth analysis and insights, often in tabular forms like Excel workbooks, and visualizations along with the detailed content which makes it very powerful to consume. The high-level summary information of detailed data can coexist on a same report giving a complete view of data.  Anything a user needs to analyze information is there and there is no need to go anywhere else for more info.
• Long-form content: Reports can be lengthy, spanning multiple pages or even volumes of books.
• Series of dashboards: Reports can comprise a series of interconnected dashboards that provide a comprehensive view of the information needed to understand the status of things.
• Series of dashboards: Reports can comprise a series of interconnected dashboards that provide a comprehensive view of the information needed to understand the status of things.
• Reports contain detailed information: reports provide in-depth analysis and insights, often in tabular forms like Excel workbooks and visualizations, along with detailed content, which makes them very powerful to consume. The high-level summary information of detailed data can coexist in the same report, giving a complete view of the data. Anything a user needs to analyze information is there, and there is no need to go anywhere else for more information.
• Long-form content: Reports can be lengthy, spanning multiple pages or even volumes of books.

Additionally, reports come with a broader distribution option at scale. Reports can be accessed on the portal or distributed to individuals or a group of users in various formats while catered to their needs.

You can:

• Consolidate views from all sources and distribute an unlimited number of reports to an unlimited number of users through bursting.
• Send a single report with any combination of formats (supported are PDF, CSV, XML, excel, html) with different filters to different users and groups.

What are the main report capabilities?

• Analytical content creation and distribution at scale. When you want to distribute, schedule, or burst it to a large scale of consumers
• Reports can be secured and governed with permissions at row level, report level and capability level – when you have strong regulations.
• Real-time access to data and its source. Store or cache a subset of data in Cognos for free.
• Ability to connect to various data sources on-premise and on cloud.
• Ability to connect with live dimensional, relational, and OLAP data sources
• Highly customizable interactive reports to meet different business needs
• Data can be presented at a summary and detailed level.
• Various visualizations are available, including maps.
• Drill up/down and drill through abilities in reports.
• Advanced custom queries and calculations
• Reports can be highly formatted and make pixel-perfect representations of your data. Every element can be customized to the pixel level.
• Combine different layouts and formats in a single asset.
• Flexible filters and prompts can be created to help slice and dice data.
• Support multiple locales within a single report.
• Existing templates and themes that can also be customized
• Customizable reporting interface based on user roles and groups
• Full range of bursting via email. Scheduling options, alerting, and notifications
• Content can be shared via email, Slack, and Teams, embedded in 3rd party applications, archived, or the output can be saved to cloud storage.
• JavaScript API interface allows the creation of custom reporting objects.

While you can create most dashboard-like content in the Report tool (except for advanced features like AI Assistant and forecasting), you cannot create all report-like content in the Dashboard tool. 

When to use dashboards instead of reports:

• You want to make a quick overview of the metrics you want to analyze. Freely drag and drop your data to get a quick answer to an ad-hoc question.
• Your sharing scope is limited to direct colleagues or teams.
• You want to provide the business with a Mock-up of a dashboard.
• You want to help a manager/stakeholder on the spot by showing what you have available in the data.
• You want to empower your users with an easy self-service tool
• Add and use forecasting and the AI-assistant 
• When you want competent assistance with selecting a visualization that suits the content of your data.
• When you want to use the Story and Exploring tools directly and make it interactive.

What you can’t do with a dashboard:

• You can’t schedule or burst it.
• You can’t make pixel-perfect representations of your data.
• You can’t organize your query.
• You can’t set any default parameters or create them.
• You can’t make joins or unions in your query.

In conclusion, while both dashboarding and reporting functionalities are essential features of BI tools, they serve different purposes. The audience for dashboards and reports typically includes business leaders, managers, analysts, and other stakeholders who need to make informed decisions based on data.

Dashboarding is the visual storyteller, offering a high-level, ad-hoc, interactive view of your KPIs and metrics, enabling users to quickly identify trends, patterns, and anomalies.

• Business users who need to monitor and analyze current data to inform daily operations
• Teams that require quick access to data to respond to changing market conditions
• Executives who want to track high-level metrics and KPIs

Reporting is a cornerstone of data analysis, offering a structured approach to derive in-depth insights. It is designed to support strategic decision-making by providing both high-level overviews and detailed insights. Reporting enables users to create complex queries, apply filters, and generate and distribute reports in various formats, allowing more profound exploration of the data.

 They are ideal for:

• Analysts and power users who need to perform complex analysis and create detailed reports.
• Business stakeholders who require regular, scheduled reports to inform strategic decisions and distribute information among users or consumers.
• Auditors and compliance teams that need to track and report on specific metrics.

Choose the right tool for the job. Get both and more with Cognos Analytics - Advanced Business Reports and Stunning Dashboards with AI-infused capabilities in one.

SOURCES:

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/battle-report-vs-dashboards-gilbert-s-m-nuijten/

Senturus https://senturus.com/blog/comparing-reports-and-dashboards-in-cognos-analytics/