Item: IBM Cognos Analytics
Rating: 9
Author: Adi arora

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is business intelligence platform which enables organizations to make insights from their data and also provides informed decisions. Few business problems and how my organization addresses it: It allows organization to create interactive dashboards and reports, and can get AI powered insights too which helps in analyze trends and metrics. Through this user can explore data from multiple sources to cover insights, patterns. It also provides ad hoc querying and predictive analytics. It performs operational analytics which helps organization to improve productivity, efficiency and customer satisfaction. we can analyze the data in real time which enhances performance and business growth.
Use Case:
Supply Chain Optimization
Sales and marketing analytics
Customer segmentation and analysis

Pros and Cons

It provides statistical analysis and predictive modeling which helps to forecast sales trends based on data and other factors.
It provides user friendly interface which helps users to explore data without extensive IT support. Like sales and marketing teams can use self service BI to analyze customer data and personalize campaigns for marketing.
It integrates well with IBM products and also with third party which enables organization to integrate with different products for better results and growth.
It provides security and governance features which maintains confidentiality, and compliance of data. It impose HIPAA compliance by providing role based access and encryption to protect sensitive data.

Sometimes there might be performance issues when dealing with large and complex data.
Although IBM provides full documentation but sometimes it's difficult to find answers to questions and connect with their customer support.
It relies on external tools for data cleaning, transformation and also for some integration tasks. It can also improve on providing wider range of data sources for integration.

Return on Investment

Positive: It provides collaboration and sharing of knowledge with other users which provides centralized access to data and reports.
Positive: It helps organization to save time and be efficient as it provides self service analytics and automated workflows.
Positive: With its powerful analytics and reporting capabilities it enables user to explore and analyze their data, identify the trends and make decisions based on those insights.
Negative: Implementing Cognos Analytics will take investments on licensing cost, training and infrastructure.
Negative: As it provides many features and capabilities, it is an issue with organization having limited IT support configure and maintain the platform.

Self-Service

AI assisted data cleansing and connecting data have helped in the process of preparing and transforming data for analysis. Automated dashboard creation supports users to quickly generate interactive dashboard without the need of technical support. Self service feature in cognos analytics helped businesses to take control of their reports and analytics without relying on IT teams. It provides flexibility in their visualization which helps users to analyze and explore their data and experiment with their visualizations.

Data Security and Quality

It helps in defining and imposing security policies for different levels, be it groups or individual levels. It implements data governance controls which helps in data quality management and also helps in improving accuracy, and consistency of data. When user know their data is secured and their confidentiality is maintained they trust those insights and decision based on this data.

Reporting

As it includes automating report generation such as scheduled report delivery which reduces manual effort, and make sure that stakeholders receive relevant information on time. It allows user to customize reports based on their requirements, and preferences. It supports variety of formats for reporting such as dynamic data visualization, traditional paginated reports. These many options allows user to choose the appropriate format according to their business needs.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop, Microsoft Power BI and Sigma Computing

Cognos Analytics provides wide range for reporting, data visualization, and self service analytics. Cognos has strong security and governance features. Sigma Computing is purely cloud native approach and has spreadsheet like interface and doesn't provide many customization options for reporting and dashboards.
Cognos can smoothly integrate with IBM products and other third party data sources whereas Sigma Computing provides integration with cloud data warehouses and data lakes.

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

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, Dataiku, Microsoft Power BI

Likelihood to Recommend

Well Suited Scenarios:
When it comes to financial planning processes, Cognos Analytics is suitable as it provides budgeting, forecasting capabilities. It helps in creating, analyzing forecasts and budgets.
When organization need to manage and monitor performances across different departments and teams Cognos Analytics is used to track KPIs, set targets and measure performance against thresholds.
Less Appropriate Scenarios:
For small stakeholders with limited resources, it might be concerning as it takes investment in cost, training and infrastructure. For them, it is cost effective to use simpler analytics tool.
For simpler and easier visualization, Cognos Analytics is not appropriate as it offers advanced analytics options and might be difficult to use and navigate through the platform.
It is not suited for those use cases, where high volume of data is streamed on real time as it offers near real time data integration.

Unlocking Business Insights with IBM Cognos Analytics

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos Analytics