Art of BI: The Benefits of Storyboarding for Report and Dashboard Creation

Storyboarding for Business Intelligence (BI) and data analytics reports and dashboards helps build visual layouts in which the reports creator can organize information and requirements, and users can easily interact during the design phase. This helps give a sense of what work has been done and what still needs to be done, plus an overall view of the final report.

There are several benefits to storyboarding during the requirements-gathering process of creating a report or dashboard.

• It creates a high-level graphical view with visual layouts
• The storyboard can cover all parts of the process – access, integration, transformation, and analysis
• It allows you to put ideas in a tangible format
• The storyboard can always be revised as needed

The use of storyboarding is emerging as the preferred method for designing custom reports that satisfy the end users and data security protocols.

Analytical reports are normally designed and built from the piecemeal elements by IT personnel who gather the needed requirements. The gathered requirements are then designed and built into dashboards or reports with the help of the storyboarding process. They are then handed off to those team members who make decisions based on business processes that involve multiple analyses.

“The BI storyboard lays out all the major actions that occur when business people are performing analysis in the BI application. The scenes that are used in the BI storyboard are each analytical process the business person performs in the BI application.” — Rick Sherman, author of Business Intelligence Guidebook, “The Growing Use of Storyboarding in Business Intelligence Design,” SciTech Connect/Elsevier

Storyboarding enables users to perform several analyses at an early stage and determine whether the performed actions are satisfactory. This in turn enables the designers to gain a better perspective on how each type of analysis is related, and enables the development of a more accurate final output.

To learn more about how to use storyboarding in the requirements-gathering process, download Datavail’s white paper, Storyboarding in Oracle Analytics: Giving Light to the End of the Requirements-Gathering Tunnel, or contact Datavail today.

With more than 600 database administrators worldwide, Datavail is the largest database services provider in North America. As a reliable provider of 24×7 managed services for applications, BI/Analytics, and databases, Datavail can support your organization, regardless of the build you’ve selected.