Organizations have been familiar with Business Intelligence (BI) for many years. BI provides data and analytics to help business leaders make more informed decisions. We are seeing the evolution of Business Intelligence and it’s happening right before our eyes. Enterprise has been progressively entering an era ruled by data. Consequently, BI has evolved to include other types of analytics. Descriptive Analytics Reporting engines make...

IBM Cognos Analytics empowers business users to bring in any external data together with Cognos managed data for greater insight and agility.  A common business use case would be to bring in your monthly sales targets for each sales person. Here is the scenario – You would like to create a simple Sales versus Targets report by salesperson, however, you do not have your sales targets data in your system.  Sales targets are only...

Many businesses inundated with data tend to tough it out with inadequate analysis tools because they are not aware of how or why business intelligence (BI) solutions can provide value. This article will cover the various ways BI and analytics in general can take your business to the next level and when the right time is to seriously consider implementing an analytics solution. There are many definitions of BI, simply put, it describes...

Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) are separate entities serving distinct functions in organizations. The data warehouse, representing the enterprise information architecture, serving to achieve a “single version of the truth”, is still necessary today to support the user-facing BI system in the DW/BI solution.  Perhaps once operational systems can be completely standardized, reduced to simply transactional data...

IBM Cognos Analytics 11 is a new platform with rich capabilities which IBM has stated will be rolled out incrementally via its quarterly updates. The Cognos 11 UI has changed dramatically from Cognos 10.  In many ways, this is a change in the right direction.  However, there are some nice and usable features that we had in the Cognos 10 UI not yet available in Cognos 11. One of them is the capability of retrieving the URL of a report....