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
Kira
Score 7.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Kira, now from Litera (acquired August, 2021) is software that searches and analyzes contract text. Kira offers pre-built, machine learning models covering due diligence, general commercial, corporate organization, real estate and compliance. Using Kira Quick Study, anyone can train additional models that can identify any desired clause. Kira can be deployed on virtual data rooms and other large repositories of contracts, creating summary analyses.
Our first and most basic scenario was to automatize the creation and publication/sharing of business reports that used to be created manually by employees throughout our organization. Using Cognos for that first use case worked well. The advanced analytics functionalities we used on the aggregated data were also as expected. However, the user interface is not always intuitive, and there is a steep learning curve, so I would recommend Cognos only to large organizations where there is a need for the most advanced functionalities (AI analysis/prediction).
Kira is a great due diligence tool and can be well utilised on both large and small transactions. It also has good application if you are looking to compare multiple documents against a model form document or market standard templates. Kira is less useful if you are looking to review emails (e.g. as part of a disclosure exercise); or if your review involves non-Latin based script languages.
Sometimes there might be performance issues when dealing with large and complex data.
Although IBM provides full documentation but sometimes it's difficult to find answers to questions and connect with their customer support.
It relies on external tools for data cleaning, transformation and also for some integration tasks. It can also improve on providing wider range of data sources for integration.
Inability to relabel smart fields to suit the review process means it is hard to align it to particular projects (e.g. it would be useful to relabel the "Assignment" smart field as "Is the contract assignable?")
Not enough non-English smart fields.
Needs the ability to resell user-trained smart fields in a marketplace.
Output is not customizable enough.
Built-in analysis tools are useful but a little basic.
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.
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.
If our firm had more contracts in English, the usability of Kira would be rated higher. However, since we have to train clauses in Portuguese in order to use Kira, it makes its usability lower. We still are not able to fully use Kira for reading contracts in Portuguese. It takes a long time and many associate hours to make Kira usable in other languages.
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.
Customer Support is excellent. The online help portal is probably the best I have ever seen. Great videos with content easily found. The HelpLine is staffed by knowledgeable people. The videos have saved us providing a lot of in-house training, which we would struggle to resource. The account managers really know the product and their law firm clients and share best practices and trends.
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.
In the past Management had used Excel and Workiva capabilities to create the reporting dashboards that were being used to make decisions. Since switching to IBM Cognos Analytics the Company has been much more efficient and decision making has been streamlined. IBM Cognos Analytics was chosen due to its reputation and data visualization capabilities and neither have been wrong.
Kira offers a lot more out of the box than other providers and is also more flexible around integrations. This, plus the clear pricing structure, is why we went for it instead of (or as well as) others. Diligen, RAVN, Leverton, Della, Seal not in list.
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.
