Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos
IBM Cognos is locally known as RAPS (Reporting, Analysis and Planning System). RAPS is a reporting tool that sits atop the data warehouse managed by Information Systems & Technology. It is used for reporting on a variety of business operations areas, including finance and human resources.
- Strong at pulling data from a single package.
- Allows for some data analysis and changing of field names.
- Provides tools to summarize data and extract into other formats.
- Limited ability to do advanced analysis.
- Often crashes when querying more than 500 records on a single filter.
- Does not easily allow for connections between multiple data sources.
- Documentation is unclear / unavailable to power users.
- Oracle PeopleSoft
IBM Cognos is definitely more robust as a reporting and analysis tool than PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, in my experience. PeopleSoft is primarily transaction-oriented, rather than data-driven.
Many departments still use Focus, WebFocus, and various home-grown legacy systems. But penetration of Cognos is growing, as the IS&T Data Warehouse grows and more packages are made available.