Self-Sufficient with Cognos Analytics

April 5, 2016

It’s taking a while for organisations to understand what Cognos Analytics means and how it will affect their business, often thinking it’s just a face lift with a few additions. However the additions are significant and they could have far reaching consequences.

Aimed squarely at line of business, the new platform enables any member of the organization to perform their own BI functions using a blend of their own data and corporate data, without requiring any IT involvement. This could be marketing uploading new customer segmentations and joining them to the corporate results or HR accessing secure personnel records from the data warehouse to compare against external salary comparisons. Take a look at this article from my colleague, Kym Wilson, to see how this is achieved

EMPOWERING THE BUSINESS USER

The whole process is entirely browser based, all the way from data uploading and intent based modelling, through to the intelligent analytics. This means your end users can securely upload their own data and then model, analyse and report over it, from anywhere to anywhere. There will be no more queuing for IT resources in order to load, model and publish data. When someone creates meaningful analytics, then IT can be employed to move the content into the corporate standards and operationalise the whole process. This empowers the business to use the corporate tool for data discovery and analytics, and then migrate the content into the corporate process, without having to reinvent the wheel.

Scary thought? For those of you worried about the governance of users uploading and modelling their own data (and there are a lot of you), think about this. What are they doing at the moment and why are other reporting applications getting a foothold within the organisation? How often have you been frustrated to hear of other departments implementing non-standard reporting solutions? Wouldn’t it be better to implement a platform which allows you to control and govern who can upload data, how much they can upload and where they source their data from? By enabling people to connect their own data to the corporate sources you will keep everyone within the platform and they will have no need to build separate reporting applications.

A TRULY SELF-SUFFICIENT BI PLATFORM

With Cognos Analytics you can enable, control and manage a truly self-sufficient BI platform, removing the reporting silos across the whole organisation in one swift move. When one of your customers discovers something of interest and creates analysis worth sharing, that content can easily be shared amongst their team; it can be operationalised using the same platform without any complication. No other vendor has enabled end users to cooperate with central functions in this way.

I honestly believe this is set to be a game changer. There may be specific features and functions that other vendors also have, but IBM is streets ahead in terms of a truly empowering enterprise platform.

This article was published on LinkedIn by Principal Consultant, Tom Clark. View the original article here.

Back to news