Dashboards or portals originally promised to become the most important application in any enterprise, tying together every system and source of information into a single application that presented a highly personalized view to each user. Unfortunately, many dashboards have fallen short of this goal, and have become little more than static Web interfaces to existing systems.
Providing a browser "veneer" on applications is not adequate in today's business environment. To effectively meet business requirements, dashboards need to bridge the tremendous gap between unstructured and structured data by providing intelligence and context for information in real time.