Item: IBM Cognos Analytics
Rating: 10
Author: Sandy Midili

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My organization, QueBIT, is an IBM Premier Partner and has conducted hundreds of successful implementations of IBM® Cognos® TM1®, IBM Cognos BI and IBM SPSS. We help organizations improve their agility to make intelligent decisions that create value. I also provide internal and external training on IBM Cognos TM1, BI, & SPSS. We provide the critical knowledge transfer to maximize the ROI for each client.

Pros and Cons

Business Intelligence tools provide sophisticated reporting, dashboards and analytical tools for businesses to explore and interact with information from IBM Cognos TM1, corporate ERPs and data warehouses, IBM SPSS, and even third party solutions like QueBIT's FrameWORQ products.
The dashboards and visualizations can range from simple to intricate drill-down/up and drill-through reporting, allowing users to interact with the tool with various methodologies such as prompts and filters to assist them in analyzing the data with fast response times.
If you integrate the IBM solutions, such as IBM Cognos BI, TM1, and IBM SPSS, you get models to align historical data and examine reasons behind past successes or failures in order to gain insight. Finance, sales, marketing and operations typically rely on this type of analysis for management reporting. You can also add another degree of sophistication by integrating IBM SPSS for statistical and artificial-intelligence rules and mathematical optimization techniques that synthesize the factors identified by predictive analysis to suggest prescriptive decision options and actions.

Improving performance on Active Reports. This being said, I am excited to see what will happen with the newest version.

Other Software Used

IBM Cognos TM1

Data Integration

The technical configuration of hitting the data sources isn't the problem. The problems arise if you haven't invested in a data management implementation. Data warehouses should be required because ERP systems don’t store the data in a manner that supports analysis and reporting. Nor do they always gather all available data because of system incompatibilities and increasing amounts of information from systems external to the enterprise. The purpose of data warehouses is to extract data from disparate sources, cleanse it and align it so that it can be aggregated, compared and analyzed to enable business decisions. Then it is stored in a single common platform optimized to support enterprise-wide data analysis. Your reporting, visualizations, dashboards will only be as good as the source.

Collaboration and Sharing

I think the collaboration in the new version of BI has really improved. With this new version there are more capabilities by allowing users to reduce or eliminate IT intervention for many previous tasks. This gives users more self-service options and ultimately advances the analytic expertise of the organization. IBM Cognos has greater availability and is delivered through online and via mobile technology.

Likelihood to Recommend

With any business analytics tool, what you must first address is getting your data in a proper state for reporting. Your real investment is cleaning up various silo sources of information and thinking about a data warehouse strategy. Because of its diversity, I would recommend integrating IBM Cognos BI & TM1 minimally so that you can not only analyze operational [data] but also financial performance for your organization.

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence. Puts back intelligence in the corporate world....

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos