Item: IBM Cognos Analytics
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cognos Analytics is widely used by business analysts as a way to build dashboards and for data-analytic work. While other job families such as data scientists are using Python and Jupyter Notebook to connect data and visualization. The tools make easy connections with your database if your work scope is within the services that it provides.

Pros and Cons

Connection.
Prebuilt.
Visualization.

Fixed.
Community support.
Documentation.

Return on Investment

Quick.
Easy.
Pre-built.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight and Tableau Desktop

All these ones are fairly widely used in the business analyst world. There is no significant difference among them apart from the suite of tools that your company is using. If the company is using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, Amazon QuickSight is easier to be embedded in the system.

Self-Service

Under the condition that the data cleansing and data analysis/visualization are very standard, the tool does speed up the data processing data. However, for important and inconsistent data cleansing, it requires lots of manual processing, and using the tool might lead to some serious damage to the data and bad business decisions.

Data Security and Quality

This functionality definitely helps us to understand the data and perform data governance controls but it requires manual effort to check the data for monitoring. However, using python to do the data transformation in the first place, we need to spend much more time but save lots of time by leaving integration time for the monitoring.

Reporting

Overall, I am pretty happy with IBM Cognos Analytics' reports with flexible formatting. It automatically renders the graphs and makes them appealing to readers without the work of manually setting up the graphs and the layouts so it works out for standard reports. The drawback is the customization ability is quite limited.

Other Software Used

Acoustic Analytics (formerly IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics), F5 on IBM Cloud, Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation)

Key Insights

Do you think IBM Cognos Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM Cognos Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Cognos Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IBM Cognos Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Cognos Analytics again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend the product, IBM Cognos Analytics, to my business analyst colleague. For their work scope, the analytical tools that they need are mostly defined in the toolbox and this tool requires no coding background to make nice data visualization but I would not recommend it to data scientists due to lack of flexibility.

Good business analyst tool to connect datasets and visualization

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos Analytics