I was recently nominated to be an IBM Champion for 2020 by NewIntelligence’s President, Corey Mendelsohn, and got the news that I was selected in mid-January, after IBM reviewing and evaluating my contributions to the IBM technology community over the past 12 months. I am proud to join my fellow NewIntelligence colleagues, Corey Mendelsohn, a Champion for the fourth year in a row in 2020, and Shawn Mandel, VP Consulting Services, now...

This Fall saw the release of the much-anticipated release of Cognos Analytics 11.1.4.  This new version has many new features and improvements. Here is a summary of the best of what’s new in this new release: Getting Started A new welcome screen that has been designed for both new and existing users alike.  New users now have access to some new guided quick tours to help them get started and access samples that will help guide and...

IBM released its newest version of Cognos Analytics 11.1.3 in July of this summer (see our press release).  The new release includes enhancements to reporting, authoring, dashboarding, data exploration, and its natural language AI assistant, all with the goal of making it easier for non-specialist users to take advantage of self-service business analytics.  Some of the new enhancements to the report authoring capabilities in R3 of...

In December 2016, IBM TM1 effectively became Planning Analytics.  What is Planning Analytics?  IBM took the powerful, multi-dimensional calculation engine of IBM TM1 and added capabilities to make planning, budgeting, forecasting and analysis faster and more flexible than ever before. IBM Planning Analytics provides a unified Web, Excel, and mobile experience for both finance and non-finance users. It goes beyond automating manual...

In our last blog, we explained what dashboards are and the purpose of a dashboard for visualization.  As a continuation on the topic of dashboards, here is an outline of how easy it is for business users, even those who are new to analytics software and have had no prior training. To build a dashboard in IBM Cognos Analytics, you start off by going into the Cognos portal.  At the bottom left of your screen, you will see a ‘New’ button...