In a recent webinar, Delivery Excellence Technical Lead, @BraamSmithCLSA , shared invaluable insights into the modern world of reporting and dashboarding within the Pega Constellation design system. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by a long list of reporting requirements or struggled with inflexible reporting tools, this summary is for you.
Watch the video (19 minutes) →
What you will learn
The Foundation: It All Starts with a High-Fidelity Blueprint
While you can’t model your dashboards directly in Pega Blueprint, a well-designed blueprint is the bedrock of your reporting strategy. By defining your business outcomes and data model with precision, you are laying the groundwork for a powerful and flexible reporting experience. A key takeaway is the importance of carefully designing the “primary fields” for your case types and data objects, as these directly feed into the self-service reporting capabilities of Constellation.
Empowering Business Users with Self-Service Reporting
Gone are the days of static reports that quickly become obsolete. Constellation’s “Explore Data” feature empowers business users to become masters of their own data. They can:
- Create ad-hoc queries to explore data in real-time.
- Add on-the-fly calculations to insights without needing to modify the underlying data model, which is a huge time-saver.
- Save their findings as “insights” and add them to their personal dashboards.
- Leverage AI and natural language processing to simply ask for the data they need, and let the system build the report for them.
From “200 Reports” to a Handful of Powerful Insights
A common challenge is the request to build hundreds of reports for every possible data permutation. Braam’s advice is to shift the focus from the number of reports to the business questions that need answering. With promoted filters, you can create a single, dynamic report or dashboard that allows users to filter and slice the data by various dimensions like date, region, or status. This dramatically reduces development effort and provides a more interactive and useful experience for the end-user.
Tackling Complex Data with Ease
Reporting on complex data structures, like lists within lists or data from different sources, is notoriously difficult. However, Constellation simplifies this by:
- Automatically handling joins for both embedded data and data references. This means business users can easily create reports that span across different data objects without needing to understand the complexities of database joins.
- Leveraging association rules which are now automatically created when you import a high-fidelity blueprint. This makes it effortless to report on related data from day one.
Closing
In conclusion, Pega Constellation’s reporting and dashboarding capabilities represent a significant leap forward, empowering businesses to move from a reactive, report-centric approach to a proactive, insights-driven one.
By focusing on a solid data model and leveraging the powerful self-service tools**, you can unlock the true value of your data.**
