Ibm Business Intelligence Tool

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Ibm Business Intelligence Tool – IBM Cognos 11.1.x has gone through a huge transformation over the past few years, from a business intelligence tool your grandmother used to something that could make people born after 1990 happy. The difference is big (want to say amazing but that’s too much credit), especially the user interface for developers and users is undoubtedly unrecognizable compared to any previous version.

The big thing here is that the foundation of the tool is fundamentally not that much different than even Cognos 8. Why is that a good thing? Because, expect for the front end, the tool is always outstanding from an IT architecture point of view. One of the only business intelligence tools with an architecture that is so salable that 100,000 users or 100TB of data is not a problem if you still use a single source of truth. Many business intelligence consultants I have met over the past decade with more than 10 years of experience agree that Cognos has always been one of the only tools that can be integrated into a mature IT infrastructure. While many other tools are more focused on visualizations and end up being an island of data rather than an integrated part of a mature IT architecture. And further, part of the mature KPI-PI framework for measuring an organization’s performance and using these insights to improve their organization.

Ibm Business Intelligence Tool

This ‘reasoning’ is obviously a bit biased as I mainly work with IBM Cognos. That being said, I also spent several years developing in Microsoft, Looker and Business Objects. Also, I have hands-on experience with QlikView and Tableau.

Vs 2019 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Of Analytics & Bi Platforms

1. It works with Linux: There is arguably no better operating system for enterprise environments than Linux. The backbone of almost every enterprise architecture is all Linux. IBM Cognos runs very smoothly on Linux, installation, updates and patching is high scrip table with command lines. It gives you the opportunity to automate your complete business intelligence environment in your enterprise architecture.

2. It is highly scalable: IBM Cognos uses dispatchers that point to a server to direct the workload, which is a very important prerequisite to make the tool adaptable to changes in your environment. Let it sink in for a moment, you can make dozens of dispatchers, each focused on different types of workloads. For example, you have data that is sensitive and under law-and-regulation policies, point all these requests to a dedicated server. You have a self-service environment that you don’t want to interfere with your “important” requests, point it to another server. You have data that the executives use and should have very high performance without interruption, point it to a special server. I think you get it now, you can create a whole ecosystem even with load balancing and fallback servers.

3. Almost everything is under your control, almost every button, ability or feature is managed by a friendly user interface that makes OPS much easier, no coding, no editing and source or DDL files with JSON/XML ( not completely correct, in some cases you need to change some configuration files).

4. Security, you will see a higher percentage of organizations using IBM Cognos that are “under pressure” from many regulations and laws. For the simple reason that IBM Cognos offers you an architecture where security is highly granular, easy to maintain and easy to integrate into your enterprise security. You can reuse the security of your LDAP / AD in Cognos and manage the security outside Cognos (probably the best option, a bit more work at first) or manage it inside Cognos. Folders, data sources, reports, capabilities are all easy to secure to meet internal or external regulations and policies.

Cognos Vs Business Objects Vs Crystal Reports

5. (Manageable) reports, the report functionality (the tool to build reports) gives you a pixel perfect reporting tool that is probably the best part of Cognos. The learning curve is steep (it takes a while to get the hang of it) but the possibilities are endless from caching strategies for setting different objects in the report to reusing queries, conditional formatting and variables. The list is endless, well kind of.

6. XML and JavaScript compatible, the report tools are fully XML exportable and Java scriptable which makes the possibilities endless. There are dozens of JavaScripts examples available to power your reports. (Something I personally do not recommend). The good thing is that the current version makes the JavaScripts reusable, which is a great way to centralize your functionalities and make them more manageable to use. The XML format is a great thing for several reasons; I use it to debug, make quick changes in a report (Control + H) or simply export/import from one to another environment. There are also tools (DRU provided by IBM or external parties like MotioPI) to scan your entire environment and basically change anything you want at once. For example; You have 1200 reports that have a hard coded title and you need to change it, this can be days of work. This can only take a few minutes in Cognos. (Please make a backup of your content store before doing this, even the tool will warn you about it!)

7. Fully integrated with InfoSphere, especially in large organizations like ING it is crucial to have a highly transparent, manageable and efficient data processing environment that also integrates business rules (governance), data quality monitoring and lineage options. This deserves an entire article on its own. This is a huge advantage that not many tools (if any) have.

8. Schedule, ex / import / trigger all from a user interface, are all easily possible from a user-friendly user interface. You can easily create triggers when a certain threshold is met and a report needs to be sent to alert a manager. The import-export is very practical which is also plannable and fully manageable.

Page 8 Of 10 Top Business Intelligence (bi) Tools

9. Web Server, HTML, Browser Cognos runs in your browser via a web server, allowing you to fully integrate with any other application, website, or other means of using your reports. The pages are all HTML rendered.

10. OLAP, ROLAP, Caching Strategies and Framework Manager; least but still not last! Cognos has one of the best data modeling tools out there, Framework Manager, which gives you the ability to create a reusable semantic layer with both relational and (R)OLAP objects. Many things are governed here; avoid cross joint products, dis/enable local caching, bridge table settings. IBM is developing (never officially announced) a tool called Data Modules to replace (?) Framework Manager. My opinion and advice for IBM; please no, this tool is not ready by miles to do this. Furthermore, IBM Cognos has provided a tool called Cube Designer to create OLAP cubes that are fully manageable in your OPS user interface of Cognos.

X. Connection Options and Storage to Cloud; Since the last version (11.1.5) it is also possible to connect Cognos to a cloud environment (AWS, Azure) to save report or other object in the cloud instead of your own file system, I personally have not used it. There is also a variety of sources that IBM Cognos supports, such as Snowflake, Spark, MS Azure, Google Big Query, Denodo and many others.

There are so many more things to address that are very important to know, but the scope focuses on how a decision processor (business intelligence) can be part of a manageable IT architecture/infrastructure. More often than not initiatives to start with data start on the business side. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is usually more focused on the output (visualizations, dashboards).

Ibm Cognos Analytics Software

(!)Before you know it, you’ll be making 10 million euro decisions based on 10gig Access files that are printed into an Excel sheet that creates a CSV in a Visual Basic script that is used in a PowerBI report by the marketing manager who left 2 years ago. …

Do not hesitate to contact me with questions, I am more than happy to answer them or help you on your journey to set up a mature Business Intelligence Data Architecture.Cognos Analytics is an upgrade to Cognos Business Intelligence (Cognos BI). By adding cognitive guidance, a web-based interface and new data visualization features, Cognos Analytics provides self-service analytics for large and mid-sized organizations in all industries. At the same time, it offers security features, data governance and management features. With Cognos Analytics, users can process data from various sources, query it to find needed information, create visualizations and reports and share this data throughout the organization. The use of existing Cognos data modules and reports is supported. Cognos Analytics provides quarterly updates and supports deployment on-premises, in the cloud or both. With its mobile integration, users can also create and share reports from a tablet.

IBM Cognos Analytics does not have a free version but offers a free trial. IBM Cognos Analytics paid version starts at US$10.00.

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