ANALYTICS | VIDEO
3 Ways to Modernize Your Cognos Environment
Maximize Your Cognos Investment
In this webinar, we explore how to offer more modern capabilities for the organizations leveraging Cognos for analytics and how to drive adoption of the “augmented analytics” features of the newest version, as well as demonstrate how legacy Cognos customers can harvest the investments made in enterprise BI solutions while addressing the promised “business empowerment” of the newer-to-market data discovery tools.
Download the recording to learn the 3 ways to get started with maximizing your investment:
- Embrace Data Modules for User-Driven Value Exploration
- Enable Dashboards and Storytelling to Modernize Consumption
- Enhance Your Metadata to Drive User Understanding (and possibly Performance)
Get Your Cognos Report Card
Is your organization getting a good return on the investment they’ve made in Cognos?
It’s Time to Check!
We believe that it’s essential to get “under the hood” every once in a while to see what’s working, what’s not, and to identify what other opportunities exist.
Fill out the form below to watch the recorded webinar.
About Ironside
Ironside was founded in 1999 as an enterprise data and analytics solution provider and system integrator. Our clients hire us to acquire, enrich and measure their data so they can make smarter, better decisions about their business. No matter your industry or specific business challenges, Ironside has the experience, perspective and agility to help transform your analytic environment.
ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY
Use Data to Drive Personalized Marketing
COMPANY OVERVIEW
A large provider of travel and vacation services was looking to personalize their marketing efforts with the overall goal of increasing revenue and creating returning customers.
BUSINESS NEED
The company needed to stimulate growth and gain more returned value from marketing campaigns. Their goals were to increase sales of vacation packages, re-engage previous customers, and apply a smarter marketing campaign.
SOLUTION
Ironside’s BI team used the client’s data to deliver a solution by doing the following:
Refine the Focus
Define the Roadmap
Develop the Model
Inform Action
KEYS TO SUCCESS
The propensity model engagement resulted in the following benefits:
ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY
Predict Higher Education Student Retention Risk
COMPANY OVERVIEW
A community college providing open access to quality higher education was looking for a way of predicting student retention risk so they could intervene and help at-risk students succeed.
BUSINESS NEED
The college’s student retention rate over 6 years was below 50 percent. They knew they needed to find proactive ways of identifying at-risk students, but weren’t sure how to best leverage their data to do it. The college’s Institutional Research team brought in Ironside to test predictive modeling techniques, evaluate and select a set of predictor variables on which to base student risk scores, segment students into groups based on GPA attainment and retention likelihood, integrate with the college’s student services model, data warehouse, and BI platform, and output individualized student risk scores and intervention/retention strategies for at-risk students.
SOLUTION
The Ironside Data Science & Advanced Analytics team is dedicated to helping organizations realize the full potential of their data resources. The client brought in the team to do the following:
Define the Vision
Prepare the Data
Develop & Refine Scoring Methods
Ensure Future Progress
KEYS TO SUCCESS
Through predictive analysis, the client was able to:
ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY
Optimize Donations at Michigan State University
COMPANY OVERVIEW
Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan and is the eighth-largest university in the United States in terms of enrollment. As recently as the early 1990s, MSU was last among the Big Ten schools in endowments, with barely over $100 million in funds. This changed in the 2000s, when the University started a campaign to increase the size of the endowment.
BUSINESS NEED
MSU’s University Advancement team needed to strategically engage nearly one million alumni and friends of the university in the most strategic way possible. They needed help providing a team of 200 professionals and support staff with actionable insights, managing an Oracle transactional database with more than 1 million records (alumni, donors, friends, organizations). The staff was working with limited resources to analyze the volume of data and maximize the return on the smallest number of targets.
SOLUTION
From strategy through execution, business analytics is a process. Ironside helped MSU with the predictive modeling process by doing the following:
Define A Roadmap
Organize Data & Information
Implement, Measure, Refine
Hands-on Coaching & Mentoring
KEYS TO SUCCESS
With Ironside’s Advanced Analytics team, MSU was able to:
ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY
Formulate a Predictive Admissions Strategy
COMPANY OVERVIEW
A leading New England technical institute that looking for a way to refine its admissions process.
BUSINESS NEED
The college was struggling to admit the right students to their academic programs – specifically, students who would continue at the school beyond their freshman year. The school needed a way of evaluating prospective students’ likelihood of success that was integrated into the admissions process and provided actionable recommendations admissions officers could use.
SOLUTION
The client’s leadership team brought in Ironside data scientists to help realize the full potential of their data by doing the following:
Plan an Approach
Prepare the Data
Test and Integrate Models
Inform Action
KEYS TO SUCCESS
The client achieved successes through predictive admissions that enabled them to:
ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY
Maximize Efficiency for Utilities Demand Forecasting
COMPANY OVERVIEW
A natural gas and electricity utilities provider that serves nearly 4 million customers and invests over $1 billion in capital each year to improve service.
BUSINESS NEED
The company was struggling to accurately anticipate how much demand different areas of their network would have. This led to supply problems and scrambles to fill service gaps. They needed a predictive modeling platform that could automate processes and maximize efficiency by allowing accurate, proactive supply adjustment.
SOLUTION
The client’s leadership team brought Ironside on as an expert resource to help with the following:
Discover Data Resources
Prepare the Data
Develop & Test the Model
Deploy to the Organization
KEYS TO SUCCESS
The demand forecasting project enabled the client to:
About IBM
IBM is a leading cloud platform and cognitive solutions company. Leverage IBM’s Analytics portfolio of high-value products and solutions to turn the company you’re running today into the company you’re building for tomorrow.
ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY
Predict Top Donors for University Advancement
COMPANY OVERVIEW
Prominent university in Great Lakes region with over 12,000 students, more than $8 billion in total endowment, and 67 undergraduate academic programs.
BUSINESS NEED
The university was searching for a way to define which of the donors in their university advancement database were most likely to give. This would enable the university to more effectively target staff time and efforts.
SOLUTION
The university engaged with Ironside data scientists to collect, prepare and analyze data from 20+ years of past donor behavior—and to test and select statistical modeling methods to maximize prediction accuracy, identify the strongest drivers of behavior, and integrate predictive scores into daily university advancement activities. This required Ironside and the university to:
Analyze Available Information
Evaluate Data
Model and Score
Define Targets
KEYS TO SUCCESS
Predictive donor scoring is allowing the university to:
ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY
Enable Self-Service Analytics
COMPANY OVERVIEW
Major regional bank and financial services provider that’s been in business for almost 200 years, with over $140 billion in total assets and more than 1,000 branches.
BUSINESS NEED
The company was experiencing consistency issues with reporting. IT believed the answer was to enable users to be more self-sufficient, but disparate results from multiple sources were causing confusion. The bank needed a centralized self-service solution to help users get reliable business information independent of IT, and in the process, build on the bank’s solid enterprise analytics foundation.
SOLUTION
The Ironside Business Intelligence team’s approach is based on balance. It is equal parts governance and flexibility, with an emphasis on delivering BI solutions that enable both scheduled reporting results and spontaneous investigations into new business questions. The solution consists of:
Focus on Data
Experience Design
Portal Creation
Benchmarking
KEYS TO SUCCESS
This Self-Service Analytics project allowed the company to:
ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY
Transition to Bimodal BI Migration in Health Insurance
COMPANY OVERVIEW
Fortune 500 health insurance company with over $30 billion in revenue, more than 30,000 employees worldwide, and over 85 million customer relationships.
BUSINESS NEED
The company’s business users were hungry for analytics results, but weren’t getting them in time due to an aging Hyperion reporting system. IT regularly ran several hundred tabular-style reports on request, but users had to export and manually manipulate them to get insights. The need, therefore, was to find a way to get fresh data to business users as questions arose, while also maintaining regular reporting on core metrics.
SOLUTION
Ironside Analytics Advisory is all about developing and implementing a practical strategy, which involved helping the client do the following:
Evaluate the Options
Build a Migration Plan
Perform the Migration
Foster User Adoption
KEYS TO SUCCESS
The bimodal analytics migration allowed stakeholders to: