CODAS: Integrating Business Analytics and Report Authoring

Abstract

Business analysts create rich dashboards to find data insights and subsequently communicate these findings with data-driven reports that combine visualization screenshots and descriptive text. Conventional analytics reports convey findings statically and passively, which suffers from limited interactivity and adaptability to data changes. There is therefore a need to facilitate authoring of interactive reports in business analytics. To better support the needs of business analysts, we developed CODAS: a report authoring tool that allows analysts to transform dashboards into interactive, web-based reports through a no-coding user interface and a workflow that is compatible to business analysts' existing data analytics pipelines. CODAS supports authoring multiple levels of interactions, organizing story elements, and generating the final artifact. Through our case studies with two expert analysts, we discuss the usefulness of our system and report our findings on analysts' report authoring workflow. Our findings suggest that CODAS enables business analysts to create interactive, data-driven reports comfortably, and can complement their exisitng data analytics workflow without extra learning effort.