Every year Gartner publishes the “Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms” and when it’s released the first thing people look for is where each technology sits within the square. I have been working in this space for many years with many different technologies and here at QueBIT we are successfully implementing Cognos Analytics for our customers and I would like to share our thoughts on a product we believe in. While Gartner takes a narrower approach to modern BI, Cognos Analytics takes a broader approach. Our customers are telling us they still need some managed reporting, self-service, and data exploration in one tool to reduce the number of point-solutions that are disconnected from their enterprise systems. Cognos Analytics fulfills these needs plus a lot more.
We are very excited about all the new features in the latest release of Cognos Analytics 11.1, we believe these new features below in addition to what already existed puts us in a great position to help our clients make smart decisions about their businesses.
IBM’s global conference event was held last week under the moniker ‘THINK’ for the second year in a row. This year’s conference took over the SOMA district of San Francisco with 30,000 attendees occupying 117 hotels in the area. This marks a break from 12 straight years of a Las Vegas based event, and the blend of indoor and outdoor venues was a welcomed change from the crowded hallways and slot machines of the Mandalay Bay. Unfortunately, there was a torrential downpour throughout the week which put a damper on several of the outdoor events (and yielded 60,000 wet shoes!), but the innovative Moscone Center was fresh off of completing a $551 million makeover and has tons of potential as a world class setting. IBM already has the venue under contract for 2020 and we look forward to returning to a drier event next year.
I’d like to give a shout-out to Microsoft Excel, the venerable spreadsheet software. If your job description includes reporting, budgeting, planning or forecasting, you rely on Excel to get your job done. Period.
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.
Topics: ReportWORQ, Print Report
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."
Topics: Cognos Analytics, augmented intelligence
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.
Topics: CDM
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.
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.
Topics: Cognos 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.
