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New to Pax?
With the move from Perspectives to the new-and-improved Planning Analytics for Excel – many people are asking “Where is my Print Report?” For those of you who’ve never experienced Print Report before, it was a feature in Perspectives that allowed users to generate reports with multiple sheets or books driven off of subsets. This was used to package up and email reports to users or publish them to SharePoint. Unfortunately, this feature is not available in PAx.

Cognos Analytics 11.1, augmented intelligence, advanced and embedded analytics, and beyond!

The golden era of analytics is upon us; smarter systems, augmented with artificial intelligence, capable of managing and filtering massive amounts of data, empowering end users to make smarter decisions, and delivering major returns on investment in the process. According to Gary Quirke, CEO of QueBIT, in a recent CFO magazine webinar, “this period in history will be defined by the commencement of man and machine working in perfect harmony, combining machine artificial intelligence with the irreplaceable power of human intuitive reasoning to achieve optimum decision making performance."

Google “Accounting Scandals” and you will find plenty of Top 5 and Top 10 lists that include companies like Waste Management (1998), Enron (2001) and Tyco (2002). These are famous examples where top executives were caught committing fraud, and were punished with fines and prison time.

On December 13, 2018, Brian Moore and Colin MacDonald from QueBIT conducted a public Advanced Topics webinar on the subject of IBM Planning Analytics and Planning Analytics Workspace. The webinar covered information about upgrading from older versions of IBM Cognos TM1, as well as Tips and Tricks on how to make the most of the new features.

Watch it now!

IBM wants you (at least 60% of you anyway) to be boundless data explorers. They want you to fearlessly, confidently, and proactively plan, describe, diagnose, predict, and prescribe (actions) based on your organizations' information. They want you to seamlessly move from data prep, to modeling, to reporting and dashboarding, to dare I say, predictive analytics.

As professionals the exciting and fun part of our jobs is identifying and solving a great challenge that helps drive our business and make us better. However the daily grind keeps us from finding the time and energy needed to be innovative and forward looking.  Personally as a software engineer I look to automate every non-fun part of my job (and my life) so I can focus as much effort as possible on solving these challenges and feeling the reward for doing so.  Automation brings scalability, consistency, maintainability and definition to the things we do.  I could come home at the end of the day and say “I spent the day building personalized reports for all 100 of our business leaders today”, only to have to say it again next month.  Or I could come home and say “I spent the day building a system to send reports to business leaders and it doesn’t care how many of them there are”.  Clearly the latter is the leader, the innovator and the one who’s going to make a difference. We built ReportWORQ to enable you to build a system and make that difference. 

In my previous post, Data Warehouse versus Data Lake – The What and the Why (Part one), I discussed the differences between data lakes and data warehouses and when you would use each pattern. In this post I’ll discuss, at a high level, an iterative process for building a data warehouse.

The Dashboard tool in Cognos Analytics 11.0.12 now has the capability of drilling-through to reports, enabling integration between dashboards and reports, and thus access to more detailed information from high-level dashboards.

How many projects have you been involved with where you told your business partner you have all the data they need, only to find out the data is far from complete or not in a form they can use? How many deadlines are missed as a result? How does this impact your relationship with other parts of your organization?