Absorb Analyze provides deeper insight into your learning program and the path between learner data and business results. This business intelligence solution equips organizations with tailor made interactive reports to visualize trends while helping your business make informed decisions. Leverage all of your data, analyze it, and visualize it to impact business decisions and drive change.
This article will provide an overview of Analyze in order to get you started with a high-level understanding of processes and terminology.
The following are a few highlights of this tool:
- Drill Down into Your Data: Access a set of BI widgets (maps, gauges and charts) with complete customization options to create intuitive, all-in-one dashboards for administrators, providing immediate access to ad hoc reporting and long-term analysis.
- Establish Performance Alerts: Obtain automated alerts to specified report viewers when key thresholds are hit through the Pulse feature. You will be able to identify where their training program can improve and measure its effectiveness.
- Analyze Future Opportunities: Observe trends and use forecasts to understand possible future scenarios for learning engagement and other relevant business metrics.
- Unlock Data Driven Insight: Automatically generate narratives, or text summaries, that provide an easy way to understand data. You can get the answers they need to improve their training programs and operations.
- Make the Report Your Own: Branded dashboards and themes allow you to create effective reports while visualizing their data with predefined fields, groupings that match the unique corporate brand.
Basic Concepts and Terminology
Dashboards
Analyze is single stack solution which simplifies complex data using customized Dashboards. A Dashboard is a collection of one or more Widgets that visualize the data that you select and design.
You define which Widgets appear in the Dashboard, their design, how they are organized, and the filtering of the data that appears. You can access your own Dashboards and Dashboards others shared with you.
When you create a Dashboard, you are that Dashboard’s owner. Owners can share Dashboards that they have created with other Analyze Users. Analyze provides a variety of built-in automatic Dashboard sharing features. You can share a Dashboard with others in the Analyze environment or have a Dashboard automatically delivered to your chosen recipients by email (on a scheduled basis or upon each data update).
Widgets
Widgets are an element of the Dashboard which are configured to display a dynamic visualization of data. Widgets can be a standard report view with columns of data or can be configured to be a visual representation of data.
You pick the type of data to appear in a Widget and you pick the type of visualization (chart type). A few popular examples of widgets are displayed below:
| Column Chart Widget | Indicator Widget | Scatter Chart Widget |
Fields
The visualization of data in Widgets is determined by the data sources that are selected. These data sources are known as Fields.
You create Widgets by selecting from the Fields displayed in a Data Browser, which appears in various places across the product.
When designing widgets, fields can be categorized into three groups:
- Numeric Fields: Numbers (quantified data), such as course cost, enrollment count, scores, number of clicks and so on. This is data that you may want to aggregate or calculate. For example, the total of enrollments or the average of cost of training.
- Date Fields: Dates can describe both date and time values. Dates can be used to organize your data into hierarchies according to year, quarter, and month or into buckets of time such as by hour or by 15-minute intervals.
- Descriptive Fields: Items used to label and categorize, such as Courses, Departments, Categories and so on.
Generally, Widgets combine 2 or more of these types of fields. For example, to show the enrollment to a course over time, Enrollment is the numeric data and both Courses and Time are descriptive data.
Descriptive data can be considered as numeric when it is simply a count of the number of items. For example, Activities can be considered numeric when it is a count of the number of Activities. A number can be considered as descriptive when it is an actual entity (ex. an identification ID or phone number).
User Roles
Analyze licenses two categories of roles:
Designer: Designers can create, design, edit and share dashboards. Analyze Designers determine whether the user with who they share a dashboard has editing rights (is a Designer) or only viewing rights (Viewer).
Viewer: Viewers can view, explore, drill down, make selections and filter the dashboards that Designers share with them. They cannot create new dashboards or edit existing ones.
Note that in order to be assigned either license type, Users must have the Admin toggle enabled for their User Profile.
Dashboard Design:
| Permission | Designer Role | Viewer Role |
| Create/Edit/Delete Dashboards | ✓ | |
| Change Color Palettes | ✓ | |
| Create/Edit/Delete Widgets | ✓ | |
| Rename Widgets | ✓ | |
| Duplicate Widgets | ✓ | |
| Change Widget Type | ✓ | |
| Drill into Widget | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reorder Widgets | ✓ | |
| Create/Delete Dashboard Filters | ✓ | |
| Toggle Dashboard Filters On/Off | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create/Delete Widget Filters | ✓ | |
| Toggle Widget Filters On/Off | ✓ |
Sharing:
| Permission | Designer Role | Viewer Role |
| Export Dashboards to PDF, Img, CSV | ✓ | ✓ |
| Share Dashboards | ✓* |
* The user must be the owner of the dashboard or alert.
Pulse:
| Permission | Designer Role | Viewer Role |
| Access Pulse | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create Data Alert | ✓ | ✓ |
| Delete Alerts* | ✓ | ✓ |
* The user must be the owner of the dashboard or alert.
Additional Analyze Features
Trends
Trends enable you to add trend lines and apply advanced analytic models over a widget to highlight tendencies in your data and get insights quickly. Analyze supports trend lines on all Column, Line, Area, and Bar charts.
Forecast
Forecasts enables you to forecast future values based on historical data. The flexible forecast settings allow you to easily change a parameter and see how it affects future values, so you can understand which scenario will help you meet your targets and take the right business decisions.
Analyze Narratives
Narratives calculates your data and generates text-based insights displayed alongside your visualizations making it easier for you to reach decisions faster.
Pulse Alerts
Pulse is a special dashboard where you can add values from widgets from various dashboards. This allows you to stay on top of your most important KPIs across multiple dashboards. Additionally, you can create alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are met or anomalies in your data are detected.
Scheduled Reports in Absorb Analyze
The Report Manager functionality enables you to configure and schedule an export of data from your Analyze Dashboards. More details can be found here.
Language Support in Absorb Analyze
Designers and Viewers can now interact with the User Interface in the following languages:
- English
- Chinese (Simple)
- French (France)
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Portuguese (BR)
- Russian
- Spanish (ES)
- Spanish (LA)
- Dutch
Analyze BI languages will be controlled by the native LMS Language settings. The order of priority for Language settings in Analyze BI is User’s Language Settings > Default Portal Language Settings > Default Analyze BI Language Setting (English).
If the selected language is unavailable in Analyze BI, it will resolve to the next available priority Language setting. Please refresh after changing your Language setting.
Data Source Additions
Analyze BI designers can now display information about the age of the data in a given Dashboard or Report. This is useful in providing transparency and setting expectations on the currency of the data in Analyze BI.
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Data Source Name: Analyze Info
- Table Name: Sync Info
- Field Name: Last data refresh
Please note that the data in Analyze is refreshed every 3 to 4 hours, and as a result the Last Data Refresh date is a reliable approximation based on when the data was extracted from the LMS.
Enrollment Keys in Absorb Analyze
Analyze BI designers can no create Reports about their enrollments and their associated Enrollment Keys. They can also filter their Reports and/or Dashboards by Enrollment Key Names. This is useful in monitoring the use of Enrollment Keys for any given training initiative. The Enrollment Key Name field will be available in the following data sources/tables:
- Curriculum Enrollment
- Course Enrollment
- Course Bundle Enrollment
Please see the article on Absorb Analyze Data Dictionaries for more information.
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