Item: IBM Cognos Analytics
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cognos Analytics is used in the whole organisation for Tactical and Strategical purposes. I am in the Business Intelligence Team and we produce Reports and Dashboards. We also use Jobs and Events to launch it when the ETL jobs finish to load the target tables. [With] the product we can report on activities and financials data.

Pros and Cons

Creating Reports
Creating Dashboards
Drill throught from one report or dashboard to a detailed report
Add extension to add new reporting possibilities to the product

Some earlier versions comes with bugs more than before with Cognos 10
Advanced reporting need experienced user
Dashboards are difficult to be correctly sized into a page

Return on Investment

Time saved
Creating reports and Dashboard are easy
Easy access to the tool

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Analytics Server (formerly Oracle BI Foundation Suite) and Qlik Analytics Platform

The product IBM Cognos Analytics contains so many features that it can respond to any demands. It has Reports, Dashboards, Packages, Data Modules, Data Sets, Jobs, Events, external data files, Direct DB connections,... When other are limited. For example, Qlik Sense allow to build very nice and fast report but is not easy to get in hands. For example, adding metadata referencing target data need to know a SQL and specifics language and is not easy to users not in the IT department, while Cognos is more easy to use. Also, Cognos has an easy reporting scheduler with possibility to send report to a folder or by email (+ bursting, events, ....)

Self-Service

Cognos has an easy reporting scheduler with possibility to send report to a folder or by email.
For advanced reporting, we can also add directly an SQL statement using the defined connection to our datawarehouse.

Data Security and Quality

With Cognos, we can create groups and roles to grant access for users to folders or reports in the portal.
So you can activate some data for specific people.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Office 2016 (discontinued), Microsoft Powerpoint

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Cognos Analytics can be used for Tactical and Strategical purposes. You can produce Reports and Dashboards. You can also group executions of several reports into a single Job and create an Event to launch it when the ETL jobs finish to load the target tables.
You can also add External files likes Excel Files then create a datamodule to join it with source Package or another Data Module.

IBM Cognos Analytics does not allow the possibility to correct some errors values in the data.

Cognos is a fantastic tool with plenty of possibilities

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos Analytics