IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
$10
per month per user
Visier People
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Visier aims to give organizations a "Workforce AI Edge:" A set of AI-powered capabilities that help leaders understand the relationship between people and work, elevate employee productivity, and win by adapting to change faster. The company offers people analytics, workforce planning, and compensation allocation. All Visier technology is underpinned by its Real-time People Data Platform, which uses AI to unlock the business-transforming potential of people data, work data, and the fusion…
Well suited: Financial reporting - It can handle complex, pixel perfect, muti-page reports with scheduled delivery to stakeholders (like sales report by region on quarterly periodicity) Operational dashboard across departments - It can combine multiple data sources (ERP, CRM, excels etc) with filters, and embedded AI insights Less appropriate: Live dashboards - As stated earlier as well, IBM Cognos Analytics doesn't suit well for live dashboards or event driven data. For ex: live web traffic data or IOT device data, etc Data science - Although IBM Cognos Analytics is great tool for data exploration but it should not be used as a substitute for Python or R, which has edge over advanced modelling and stats based workflows like predictive modelling or clustering
Visier People is well-suited for organizations that require the ability to record thorough information on analytics of the company, and to have the change of measuring training's productivity impact. The software isn't well-suited for those who tend to feature a lot of models into the software as the platform doesn't record/support most models, so some data isn't able to be recorded.
The database is very complete and detailed, thus being able to enhance a deep analysis of each user.
The Visier dashboard is extremely attractive and friendly, helping staff understand every detail of the analyzes conducted on the company's workforce.
Despite not being a great and complete solution to work with HR within this platform, however, data can be shared to exchange information between the head of each department of the company and HR staff and to speed up the analysis process and determine what to do with a low-performing employee.
It excellently determines the productivity of each employee and also determines risk by monitoring patterns and behavior.
IBM Cognos Analytics enables customer data segmentation, which is essential for marketing, improving and streamlining purchasing behavior and preferences. This helps companies create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
Our clients Through data analysis, we can identify and observe trends in the behavior of other clients, allowing us to anticipate needs and adjust strategies to avoid consequences.
Visier is a people analytics tool, so all data points are tied to employees. It can be difficult to analyze data points that aren't tied to employees (e.g., certain job data) since the data is driven by people metrics.
Visier releases updates quarterly. While this cadence does provide room for updates and enhances to be implemented in the tool throughout the year, other software providers operate on a more continuous update schedule.
For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
It is a software with great resources, it increases the possibility that the entire workforce is productive, it gives us quick answers, it is the most powerful workforce analysis software that exists so far.
We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.
Visier People makes it very easy for all end users to go in and see, pull, or dig in to their data where previously my team would have to pull or schedule a report of the data to each user. It is also very fast in updating charts/analyses when changing or adding filters, which makes the ease of use better. Last, the charts and analyses are very visually appeasing, making users want to use the platform more.
Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point
Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.
Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.
Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.
The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us
Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.
Visier can move as quickly or as slowly as the client needs. The topic-by-topic approach separates the project in clear phases and allows for focus on specific data. Depending on the size of the implementation team, implementation could move more rapidly if the subject matter experts are responsible for the individual topic data sets.
Power BI is stronger for quick ad-hoc analysis and dashboards, but IBM Cognos Analytics is better when consistency, precision, and mass distribution matter. Tableau is best for interactive analysis, while IBM Cognos Analytics is better for standardized, repeatable enterprise reporting. Sigma shines for customizable dashboards and drill-down analysis while IBM Cognos Analytics holds an edge in data discovery and visualization.
Visier People has a user-friendly interface and easy-to-use virtualization as compared to other similar tools available in the market. It also provides multiple prebuild templates for HR and workforce analytics which reduces the time and effort required for manual implementation. It can seamlessly be integrated with other ranges of HR and business systems to make it easier for organizations to centralize the workforce and HR data for analysis.
The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.
In one case, we were able to realize a 25% reduction in turnover in a key job group by leveraging the insights we derived from Visier workforce analytics.
In one case, we were able to identify key turnover trends that would place a business' strategy at risk (due to the fact that turnover was in revenue-generating roles).
In both businesses I've used Visier, we were able to significantly reduce manual reporting (by more than 80%), enabling our data analysts to do more consultative work (vs. query generating work) with HR business partners.
