2. Table of Contents
1 Introduction............................................................................................................................. 3
2 Does your organization use the Current IBM Cognos Business Intelligence to its full
Potential?......................................................................................................................................... 3
2.1 Self Service ...................................................................................................................... 3
2.2 Issues................................................................................................................................ 3
2.3 Analysis (slice and Dice).................................................................................................. 4
2.4 Monitor Activity............................................................................................................... 4
2.5 Work Off line ................................................................................................................... 4
3 Does your Organization have the additional IBM Cognos Capability? ................................. 5
3.1 IBM Cognos MS Office................................................................................................... 5
3.2 IBM Cognos Mobile......................................................................................................... 5
3.3 IBM Cognos Real Time Monitoring................................................................................ 5
3.4 IBM Cognos Business Score Cards ................................................................................. 5
3.5 IBM Cognos Statistics...................................................................................................... 5
3.6 IBM Cognos Collaboration.............................................................................................. 6
3.7 IBM Cognos Insight (Desk Top Analytics) ..................................................................... 6
3.8 Cognos Software Development Kit (SDK)...................................................................... 6
4 Does your Organization uses Other Application from IBM Cognos Family which could add
lot of value ?.................................................................................................................................... 6
4.1 IBM Cognos Controller.................................................................................................... 6
4.2 Cognos TM1..................................................................................................................... 7
4.3 IBM Cognos Disclosure Management ............................................................................. 7
5 Does Your IT have room to improve the potential of the IBM Cognos Application? ........... 7
5.1 Retire Power Play Cubes.................................................................................................. 7
5.1.1 DMR ......................................................................................................................... 7
5.1.2 Dynamic Cubes......................................................................................................... 8
5.2 Poor Query Performance.................................................................................................. 8
5.2.1 De Normalization...................................................................................................... 8
5.2.2 Calculations............................................................................................................... 8
5.2.3 Step by Step approach for Detail .............................................................................. 8
5.2.4 Stich Queries............................................................................................................. 8
5.2.5 Indexes and Partition................................................................................................. 9
5.2.6 Outer Joins ................................................................................................................ 9
5.2.7 In Memory ................................................................................................................ 9
3. 5.2.8 Work Offline............................................................................................................. 9
5.3 Security............................................................................................................................. 9
5.4 Adhoc Capability.............................................................................................................. 9
5.5 Consolidation and Elimination....................................................................................... 10
5.6 Common Cognos Infrastrurure....................................................................................... 10
6 Do you want to take your IBM cognos to the Next level?.................................................... 10
4. Take Your IBM Cognos to the Next Level
1 Introduction
Cognos is a business user centric application. It Provides capabilities for business usersto be
self-sufficient and independent of IT as much as possible. The application is capable of
providing business users the ability to build any Reports, Analysis and Dash Boards on their
own.IBM cognos Provides different application for History, Current and Future analysis.
Unfortunately the cognos application is not utilized to its full potential in most of the
Companies. Does your company is one of those? You will figure out the answer yourself, after
reading this document.
In this document we tried to ask you the following hard Questions?
Does your organization use the Current IBM Cognos Business Intelligence to its full
Potential?
Does your Organization have the additional IBM CognosCapability?
Does your Organization usesother Application from IBM Cognos Family which could add
value to your Company?
Does your IT have room to improve the potential of the IBM CognosApplication?
2 Does your organization use the Current IBM Cognos
Business Intelligence to its full Potential?
2.1 Self Service
1. Does your Cognos Environment provide you the ability to build your own Reports?
2. Do you able to do the analysis you want and slice and Dice the data, build Dashboards,
graphs?
3. Do you heavily use the query studio, Analysis Studio, Work Space, Work space Advanced
and Power play studio for adhoc analysis?
If the answer is “No” to any one of above questions, you are not using cognos business
Intelligence application to its full potential. Self Service is one of the big capabilitiesof IBM
Cognosand you miss that capability in your Environment.
2.2 Issues
1. Does you Environment heavily use the Can Reports (Report Studio) and you depend
upon on IT to build it for you?
2. Do you Run Reports extract the Data in Excel and build the Reports in Excel?
3. Does your Environment have Multiple Reports exists for the samedata?
4. Do you have to go to different packages for interrelated information?
5. If the answer is “yes”, your cognos application needs a Re-Engineering. In a well-designed
cognos Environment, Canned Reports (Report Studio) will be bare Minimum, one version of
Truth exists. Users does not have to spend time on excel to get the desired results and able do
analysis, build reports and dash Boards without IT.
2.3 Analysis (slice and Dice)
1. Does your Framework Manager Model is Dimensionally Modeled Relational (DMR) or
Uses OLAP cubes as data source?
If the Answer is “No”, you lose the ability to do analysis with analysis studio, build Dash Boards
and Reports with Work space Advanced on your own. You could not Drill down to a to a lower
level to analyze the Problem.
2.4 Monitor Activity
1. Do you wish to monitor a Business Activity like Budget vs Actual Variance and when the
variance crosses a limit, do you wish the Key stake holders informed about the variance,
and allow them to react to the Event?
IBM Cognos Event studio could help you monitor the Business Activity and any variance could
be informed to you thru a Email or Report and let you to follow up the Event.
2.5 Work Off line
1. Do you like to work offline in your desk top or while you are away from corporate
network ?
IBM Cognos New feature Active Reports provide you capability to work offline . The Report will
be interactive and will have layers of data in your Personal desktop, laptop or Mobile Devices.
Your Active Report or Dashboard will be interactive and Very Fast.
6. 3 Does your Organization have the additional IBM Cognos
Capability?
3.1 IBM Cognos MS Office
1. Do you like to use the Microsoft Office capabilities in your Cognos Environment?
Cognos Analysis for Excel Provide you combine the power of Excel and Cognos. You could pull
the cognos data in excel, build your own report using excel formulas and refresh the data at any
time you wish. You could Integrate Cognos with MS word as well as MS PowerPoint in your
Environment.
3.2 IBM Cognos Mobile
1. Do you like to use the access your Cognos BI Reports and Dash Boards in your mobile
and IPADdevices?
Cognos Mobile Feature Provide you that Capability. Your Reports and Dashboards could be
accessed thru your mobile devices from within your Network as well as outside of your
network. Cognos mobile additional security ensures your information is safe.
3.3 IBM Cognos Real Time Monitoring
1. Do you like to monitor your Business Performance in Real Time?
IBM Cognos Real Time Monitoring build for operational BI provide the real time monitoring of
your business activity. Data get refreshed every few seconds.
3.4 IBM Cognos Business Score Cards
Do you like monitor “What is happening now? “, thruscorecards, Metrics and Key Performance
Indicators (KPI)?
Metric Studio could help your business Monitoryour Currentperformance thru scorecards and
Metrics.
3.5 IBM Cognos Statistics
Do you like to use statistics for Process Control, Data analysis, Test a hypothesis and Graphical
Representation of Data?
IBM CognosStatistics will help you to do this.
7. 3.6 IBM Cognos Collaboration
Do you like to involve your other co-workers in Decision Making Process and help each other to
resolve a Problem?
IBM Cognos Collaborative BI will help you to connect to co-workers and involve them in the
Problem Solving Process. Business users could connect to each other like in social media using
IBM Cognos Collaborative BI.
3.7 IBM Cognos Insight (Desk Top Analytics)
1. Do you like to do your own development for your analysis independent of IT, leverage
the existing cognos for content and share your analysis to the rest of the users in
CognosEnvironment?
IBM Cognos Insight is a Desktop analytics solution build for business analysts and small
Business. This application has write back capability. Its in memory capability makes it really fast.
For an example you have collected industry wide Key performance Indicators in a File. You wish
to compare them with your company KPI. You need not go thru complex process of adding to
your data mart, see thru BI. In Cognos Insight you could integrate external File with cognos BI
compare the results, build your own Reports, dash boards and share it with your co-workers.
3.8 Cognos Software Development Kit (SDK)
1. Do you like to automate your normal administration Jobs and customize your cognos
Environment?
Cognos Software Kit (SDK) provides the ability to automate the administrative tasks, integrate
cognos with your own application, and build your own security Provider.
4 Does your Organization uses Other Application from
IBM Cognos Family which could add lot of value ?
4.1 IBM Cognos Controller
1. Do you like to do financial account Consolidation and Reporting in International
Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
(GAAP) andauditable?
2. Do like to do reduce your Financial Close time, cost?
IBM Cognos Controller ideal solution for this.
8. 4.2 Cognos TM1
1. Do you look for a write Back application to enter data?
2. Do you do your current planning in excel spreadsheets and looking for a good solution?
3. Does your current planning application cannot handle huge volume of data?
4. Do you like to do planning at a more detail level?
5. Do you look for an application which supports what If Modeling?
Cognos TM1 is the perfect tool to do your budget, Forecast, profitability analysis and what if
modeling. TM1 could also be used as a data collection Tool. If you wish to collect data in a
template across the enterprise and build your work flow process cognos TM1 Could be useful.
Even though TM1 application is widely used in finance and to some extend in sales, with its
write back capability its usage could be across the enterprise. TM1 could handle huge volume of
data.
4.3 IBM Cognos Disclosure Management
1. Do you like to eliminate manual process with intelligent work flow process and
automate it?
2. Do you like to have the Governance over Excel spread sheets, Word Documents, Power
point Slides,and PDFetc.?
3. Do you like to integrate data from multiple sources to do quantitative as well as
Quantitative analysis?
4. Do you like to do External Financial Reporting directly SEC without involving any third
party?
IBM Disclosure management and IBM FSR Reporting is the ideal solution for this. IBM FSR
Reporting XBRL Capability provides the capability to do the Financial Statement Reporting to do
the External Agencies Directly.
5 Does Your IT have room to improve the potential of the
IBM Cognos Application?
5.1 Retire Power Play Cubes
1. Do you wish get rid of the process of building Power play cubes and Managing them?
2. Do you have a very frequent data change environment and could not build power play
cube every time after the data gets updated?
IBM Cognos has better solution for analysis than power play cubes now.
5.1.1 DMR
Dimensionally Modeled Relational (DMR) Package Provides all the capabilities power play
Provides. It could use the Dynamic Query Engine Capability. Dynamic Query Engine keep the
9. Query results in memory and when the users make subsequent Query for the same data, it
Comes from Memory. So the Performance will be faster.
5.1.2 Dynamic Cubes
IBM Cognos Dynamic Cube Build capability cube Could be built in memory . Since the results
are returned from memory results will be faster and better.
5.2 Poor Query Performance
1. Do you have poor Query Performance in your CognosEnvironment?
Query Performance Could be Poor due to Cognos BI Application Sever Hardware or Network, or
on the Database issues, or due to combination of all or due to poor Design.
Let us assume you have good hardware, good network speed and Still you have poor query
Performance Issue. The issue could be more related to poor design. You get better query
performance, when minimum processing is done in the BI Application server at the time you
run analysis or Reports. Your Design should focus on that.
5.2.1 De Normalization
Your data model should be denormalized as much as possible. Highly de normalized data
structure gives a better performance.
5.2.2 Calculations
Calculations haveto be done as much as possible in the data layer and stored. Calculationsin
the Report Layer have to be avoided as much as possible and some of the calculations could be
very costly in terms of query performance. Some calculation like ratios, percentages could be
not done in the data layer.For this calculations the data has to be rolled up to the summary
level and then division has to be done. These calculations have to be in Report layer.
5.2.3 Step by Step approach for Detail
Most of the Time the users like to sees the summarized results. If they get doubts they like to
go to the detail. Build summarized tables for the Detail table. Run the Report or analysis on the
summarized tables and use the cognos Drill thru mechanisms to go to the detail analysis.
Running Queries against the Detail tables will be costly in Terms of Query Performance.
5.2.4 Stich Queries
Stich queries are multiple select statements send to the database and stitched together at the
BI Application server. This stich query will cause poor query performance and could give in
consistent results. This issue could be due to poor data modeling done in Framework manager
or Report Design.
10. 5.2.5 Indexes and Partition
Proper Indexes and Data base table partition helps better Query Process.
5.2.6 Outer Joins
Outer joins are costly in terms of Query Processing. Outer Joins have to be avoided in data
model as possible.
5.2.7 In Memory
IBM Cognos 10 has the New features Dynamic Query Mode (DQM) and Dynamic Cube. Both are
based on In Memory capability. When the users send additional query, it comes from memory
instead of database and gives better query performance.
5.2.8 Work Offline
IBM Cognos Active Reports provide the capability to work offline. Active Report or dashboard is
very interactive. Active Reports Could be utilized to resolve query performance issue for some
requirements.
5.3 Security
1. Do you still use the cognos Series 7 Access Manager or sun one LDAP and do not want
this Overhead?
IBM CognosSupports corporate LDAP like Active Directory for long time. We could simply
leverage that for cognos security. Do not have to maintain another LDAP for CognosSecurity ?
5.4 Adhoc Capability
1. Do you build most of thecanned Reports or dash boards the users want?
2. Do have the overhead of maintaining Canned Reports?
3. Do you think your existing users are not happy with existing BI?
The best solution is move to the adhoc analysis culture. Change the Cognos BI solution to more
user centric than IT centric. In a well-designed cognos solutions users are able to build reports
and dash board they want on their own without the professional report author help. IT builds a
user friendly data models and Packages. The users heavily use Query Studio, Analysis Studio,
and Work Space Advanced to build what they wish and save it in their Personal My Folder.
Professional Reports authors could help the business to build complex Reports or Dash boards.
But this should be bare minimum.
11. 5.5 Consolidation and Elimination
Every Object in Cognos Portal needs a Justification. Extra packages, different Reports for the
Same data should be avoided. In the long run this causes more overhead. Cognos supports
multi Query in a Single Report. Using the Conditional features in cognos most of these reports
could be consolidated.
IBM Cognos application supports Row level, ColumnLevel and Object Level Security.
So there is no need to create separate Reports or Packages to satisfy security Requirements.
5.6 Common CognosInfrastrurure
IBM cognos is an enterprise level, scalable Business Intelligence Application. Each functional
area need not run their own instances of cognos. Cognos Environment could be scaled up to
serve the whole Enterprise and bring down the Total Cost of Ownership and operation cost.
6 Do you want to take your IBM cognos to the Next level?
While going thru the document you could have realized some GAP in your IBM Environment.
Cognizant could help you to fill the GAP in your Environment. We have very specialized IBM
Cognos architects who could help you to take your IBM cognos environment to the next level.
We have proven expertise on this. Our Focus will be on the following four things
1. Help you to utilize your current Business Intelligence to its maximum Potential
2. Add additional IBM Cognos Capabilities to your Existing Cognos Environment.
3. Implement Other Cognos Family application based on your Requirement
4. Help your IT to Improve current Cognos Environment
