IBM Cognos Analytics

Score8 out of 10

685 Reviews and Ratings

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

1 / 9

Publish to Web
Category average: 8
Delivery to Remote Servers
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
Category average: 7.9
iFrames
An iFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website
Category average: 7.7

Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Category average: 7.4
REST API
REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications
Category average: 7.9
Mobile Application
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
Category average: 7.2

Most Frequent Users

Top 3 industries using IBM Cognos Analytics.

Based on HG Insights installation data

View all Reviews

#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

15.8%

2,096 installations of 13,279

“We use it to support metrics reporting, dashboarding, and general end user reporting requirements.”
— Sr Manager, TD SYNNEX (Enterprises)

#2 most frequent

Manufacturing

13.2%

1,758 installations of 13,279

#3 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

10.4%

1,381 installations of 13,279

“Prompts rules Schedules by BU Dashboards analytics”
— Risk & Control Director, Banamex (Enterprises)

Pros

Robust reporting and dashboard creation capabilities
Strong data modeling features for flexible calculations
Extensive data connectivity for diverse sources

Cons

Steep learning curve for new and less technical users
Complex or archaic user interface
Difficulties with administrative tasks and package management

Cástor Villa View profile

Business Analytics Manager in Finance and Accounting at Citibanamex (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our finance team uses Cognos Analytics all the time to bring all our financial statements together and see how our costs are doing. Before, reporting every three months was a real pain. It was time-consuming, complicated, manual and involved lots of different Excel spreadsheets, which made keeping track of versions a nightmare. These days, most processes are automated and use standard KPIs and metrics, which have a big impact on forecasting and helping to make better strategic choices.

Pros

Cognos Analytics is known for its built-in enterprise reporting suite, which is governed.
As well as dashboards, it lets report writers and developers create multi-page, multi-query reports on different data stores, while keeping reports centrally managed.
For us, the metadata layer is really important, and it's captured in models and Data Modules in Framework Manager.

Cons

First, it took a bit of work to get new users up to speed with advanced report designs or to understand the difference between Packages and Data Sets.
Sometimes, working out complex queries on big data sets wasn't as easy as it should've been – and that's not fair. What I mean is, it wasn't a problem with the platform itself; it was actually a problem with our first approach to designing queries and being efficient with data.
We started to see some real improvements in query performance when our BI team figured out how to optimise queries and create DMR models.

Return on Investment

We managed to cut the time it took to produce the important financial reports by up to 40% after making these investments.
It speeds up how quickly you can find data in the first place, meaning you can check your hypotheses without having to wait for the BI team.
This ability has definitely improved a lot over the past year – it's now more accurate and contextually aware.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop

Other Software Used

IBM Verify, IBM watsonx.ai, SAP Analytics Cloud

Morgan Thompson View profile

Community Manager in Customer Service at GradGuard (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Cognos Analytics for reporting/dashboards/kpi's/data analysis/etc. It addressed our issue with spending too much time figuring out KPI's, trends, and how to compile evidence necessary to support presenting documents to decision makers to add to our case as to why something needs to be done a certain way. Reporting used to be very manual but now we have the ability to have reporting consistently across each department.

Pros

Turning data into clear usable reports and dashboards
Go-to dashboard for KPI's & performance trends
Great substitute for hubspot/salesforce with quick view to the details
Centralized reporting

Cons

My less technically inclined employees often have trouble figuring it out
Feels a little archaic in terms of the interface design
Seems a little slow the bigger the data
Integrations are not top of the line
Should be able to use a co-pilot to build reports instead of doing them manually

Return on Investment

Reduced individual management time spent on reporting weekly by 18%
Reduced cost of data analytics intern ($20/hr)
Reduced cost of losing management time spent on weekly reporting
Identified poor employee performance and areas of improvement
Identified exemplary departments in need of recognition and overall employee satisfaction

Alternatives Considered

Breeze Intelligence for Hubspot, HubSpot CRM, Salesforce CRM Analytics and Gainsight CS

Other Software Used

Salesforce CRM Analytics, HubSpot CRM, Gainsight CS, CINC, Microsoft 365, CRM in Cloud by TeamSystem

Ethan Willie

Data Analytics & Reporting Analyst in Information Technology at Commonwealth Bank Ltd (501-1000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Since the introduction of IBM Cognos Analytics to my organization, we have been able to be more flexible and innovative with the reports that we are able to provide to our clients, specifically in two ways:

1. Report Customization
2. Report Consolidation
3. User Access

IBM Cognos Analytics has allowed us to be able to perform lots of report consolidation and customization. With our previous tool, it was very rigid in terms of giving the user the ability to sort and filter data however they pleased. For example, if you wanted to create a report, all conditions that were set could not be changed, so if you wanted similar data with a few minor tweaks, you would have to create a whole other report. With IBM Cognos Analytics we have been able to give that flexibility, allowing our users all the customization they need to get all data they need from one report, instead of having to create multiple reports to do the same thing.

The most important thing, IBM Cognos Analytics has allowed us to give our data consumers access to reports to run them whenever they desire instead of them having to ask us to provide them data with every request. With our previous tool, our data consumers would always need to reach out to us to provide them with reports. Now, with the feature of report views, we are able to give them access to run reports without fear of the consumer changing the reports without our approval. This has reduced that amount requests we usually have to run the same reports, daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

All in all, I have very much enjoyed my experience with IBM Cognos Analytics so far.

Pros

Report Consolidation
Easy Report customization
User Access
Easy Dashboard Creation

Cons

Report creation and formatting can become easily complicated. Feels like there is a steep learning curve

Return on Investment

Scheduling Reports
Data consumer access
Report consolidation

Everette Sands

Solutions Engineer in Information Technology at Commonwealth Bank (501-1000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I work at a local bank in the Bahamas within the IT Department. For the time I've been here, which is about 10 years, just about every week I would receive a request or a phone call for a report to be run from various Departments. This procedure would of course take away critical time that could be used for other areas that I'm responsible for on a daily basis. We've recently implemented Cognos Analytics into our environment and I must say that ever since we incorporated the tool, users no longer have to depend on IT to provide usual week to week or month end reports. Users are now logging into Cognos and are now running their own report and in some instances, we also scheduled various reports which they would now receive via email. As simple as it sounds, this process was able to completely remove the heavy load of report request to IT from the end users. Cognos Analytics is superb!!!

Pros

Data Module Creation
Report Scheduling
Single Sign On Capability

Cons

Adding the ability to create modules a bit cleaner based on iSeries Files
Adaptivity to Data Types from the iSeries so no datatype conversions needs to executed

Return on Investment

Elimination of Physical Servers/3rd Party Reporting Tools

Alternatives Considered

SAP Crystal

Other Software Used

SAP Crystal, Visual LANSA

gunjan kushwaha View profile

snr BA in Finance and Accounting at westpac (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our FinCrime team manages programs such as KYC/CDD and transaction monitoring across various detection scenarios. The volume of data, frequency, and real-time vs. batch loading are always challenges for sourcing, cleansing, and transforming data from various systems in the bank, such as POS, ATM, Web, mobile, etc. We use Cognos to create a report for the executive board on the number of alerts raised as per risk profile.

Pros

Works as a centralized reporting layer for different capabilities like KYC/CDD.
Prepare Audit and reg reports for Austrac/APRA.
visibility into case volumes.
SLA/Backlog metrics.

Cons

Team needs time to learn the tool.
People prefer Power BI over this due to UI complexity, though it differs from person to person.
Connectors to snowflake not available but that could be just my bank.

Return on Investment

Helping with interna/external Audit report.
Prepare SAR/SMR for AUSTRAC.
Executive reports for management.
Dashboards for simplified user access and overall visibility into the health of a division like KYC/CDD/TM.

Alternatives Considered

SAS Anti-Money Laundering

Other Software Used

Dataiku, Snowflake, Teradata Vantage

IBM Cognos Analytics

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

Categories & Use Cases

Media