Cognos is a great enterprise tool
February 25, 2019

Cognos is a great enterprise tool

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Analysis Studio
  • Event Studio
  • Report Studio

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos

IBM Cognos is being used by our organization across multiple applications and teams. It is used by the whole organization. We use it to capture customer information, our team performance in handling customers' belongings and performance as a whole across different departments.
  • IBM cognos is great as an enterprise tool.
  • Being able to create cubes and packages that can be used to pull exactly what you want to see specific to your group.
  • IBM Cognos allows multiple users to go in and change the report in a way that they want to see without changing the data that is provided to everyone as a whole.
  • IBM Cognos has room for improvement in its charts and graphs. They are awesome on their own but compared to Tableau fall a little short.
  • The speed of IBM Cognos could run faster, however considering the amount of data it is able to pull without slowing down makes up for the overall slower processing.
  • The ease of setup and usage has a bigger learning curve compared to similar reporting products but once again the return on effort makes it worth that steep curve.
IBM Cognos stacks up against Tableau from my experience in that it performs better with larger amounts of data and it works well with other tools to use the data or pull the data from. I selected IBM Cognos because of the ease of having users create their own views from the cubes that you build.
The reasons for my rating are that compared to Tableau it still has room for improvement in the graphs, location, and, speed. The higher ratings and 10s that I gave blow other reporting tools out of the water (e.g. range of data sources, ease of merging data from disparate sources, real-time, etc.). Overall it is the best BI tool that I use.
The reasons for my rating for the access control capabilities include ease of sharing data across teams, report distribution and formatting and security are that in my opinion it is better than the rest and can hold its own when stacked up against other BI products. For enterprise use, it is a great tool that works well.
Scenarios where IBM Cognos is well suited, are when you have large amounts of data that need to be pulled and processed as metadata. A time or scenarios where it is less appropriate is when you just want to take an Excel sheet and produce a dashboard off of that information. A desktop tool could be used in that scenario.

IBM Cognos Analytics Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
10
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
8
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
10
Report sharing and collaboration
10
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
9
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Delivery to Remote Servers
10
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
Predictive Analytics
10
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
REST API
10
Javascript API
9
Java API
9
Themeable User Interface (UI)
10

Using IBM Cognos

1001 - The business funtion that our business represents is travel
200 - The types of people and skills required to support IBM Cognos very vastly across the organization. We have IT, business analysts and more all using IBM Cognos.
  • The organization could incorporate Watson and start doing predictive analytics.
  • We could use Cognos for other departments that are not already using the tool.
  • We could merge the reports in Cognos from other teams to get a greater more developed picture of the organization.
  • The most important case for this product is analytics.
  • We also use it for dashboards viewed across the organization.
  • Also, we use it for ad-hoc reports that are requested on the spur of the moment.
  • We have been able to show drill down dashboards for more detailed reports.
  • It is easy to change a report to see exactly what you want to view.
  • Everyone is able to use the tool in the organization because it is an enterprise version and on the web so you do not need to download and license every computer.