Powerful tool for enterprise grade structured reporting
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I use IBM Cognos Analytics for its business intelligence (BI) functionality in complex reports preparation, data analysis, dashboard formulations, and monitoring business unit's sales performance over the period. IBM Cognos Analytics, helped us in solving various problems ranging from manual reports creation leading lost of hours of turnaround and human error, dealing with data silos within various departments, delay in decision making. Bing business analyst, my scope of use case for Cognos centres around turning scattered data into actionable insights by creating sales insights reports, interactive dashboards for seniors consumption, and data exploration, validation, analysis and storytelling.
Pros
- Enterprise reporting - Create, customise, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, etc.
- Dashboard creation and data exploration & analysis - Using drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualisation. Additionally, using AI powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input (formation of pie, bar, line charts). It's useful for no-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheet data to get quick answers.
- Building insights for accurate decision making - Package reports with data backed insights for stakeholders in pdf, and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting and strategic recommendations on relevant asks.
Cons
- Limited real-time data connectivity - IBM Cognos Analytics relay on scheduled data refresh leading issues in real-time or streaming data access, especially for live sales data updates.
- End point experience (Mobility) - Although it supports mobile but its experience can be improved as the app is not fully responsive or fluid like interactive filtering and dashboard creation are not user-friendly on small screen. It would be great if mobile UX is improved with better touch friendly controls and offline viewing options.
- Limited data blending - There exist some struggle to blend or join data from different sources on the fly. If it had technical capabilities like Excel based data joining in dashboard or explorations without data module requiring creation upfront, would have been great for analysts.
Likelihood to Recommend
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
