Situational awareness, thanks to SOA-driven dashboard

Everyone knows what a dashboard can do, and yes, that's SOA behind your dashboard.  So, therefore, for dashboard presentations that really dig into what's happening across the enterprise, the business should be more than willing to support SOA.

Rich Seeley recently posted some perspectives on Oracle's Business Process Management 10g Release 3, a business intelligence dashboard that enables business users to customize their view of data coming from Oracle's SOA-related technologies, including Complex Event Processing, ESB and BPEL.

The dashboard puts capabilities right in front of decision makers' eyes. They may not entirely get SOA, but they clearly see the analysis of this quarter's sales results and inventory levels displayed in front of them.

Roy Schulte, vice president of Gartner, is quoted as observing that the executive dashboard may be among the keys to bridging SOA and Business Process Management. "Business users may not understand SOA, BPM, CEP or XTP [eXtreme Transaction Processing], but they know what they want to see on their dashboard and they may be willing to fund back end architecture and development projects to get more information faster."

Of course, if it's nothing but bad news being displayed on the dashboard, the executive may just want to throw the whole thing out the window.