PLATFORM | CASE STUDY

Migrate from Oracle Discoverer to Cognos Analytics

COMPANY OVERVIEW

A private university in Massachusetts with approximately 18,000 undergraduate students and 7,000 graduate students that offers a comprehensive range of undergraduate and graduate programs in nine colleges and schools. As of 2016, the client had over $500 million in endowment funds and ranked in the top 50 in the National Universities category in the 2018 edition of U.S. News & World Report.

BUSINESS NEED

The client’s Advancement team had been leveraging Oracle Discoverer for their end user reporting needs for almost 10 years. Due to several platform and end-of-support challenges, the client engaged Ironside to help evaluate existing metadata, migrate over 500 existing Oracle Discoverer reports to Cognos, institute central governance and branding standards, and provide training and enablement to the Advancement team to foster their ability to create Cognos reports and leverage new self-service capabilities.

SOLUTION

Ironside, in collaboration with the business and IT stakeholders, developed a migration roadmap by doing the following:

Develop a Strategy

Perform extensive analysis to identify and rationalize report inventory
Develop a comprehensive plan to ensure successful migration
Migrate Oracle Discoverer reports to Cognos with minimal impact to business continuity
Enable functional users in the complete spectrum of Cognos Analytics capabilities

Create a Migration Plan

Create a collaborative plan to migrate the reports from Oracle Discoverer to Cognos that align with business objectives
Allow the right content to be available in Cognos Analytics in accordance with the client’s academic cadence and fundraising timelines

Migrate to Cognos

Assess existing reports and user needs to build an actionable migration plan
Develop a simple and intuitive metadata model to support report migration and enable self-service analytics
Migrate reports from an outdated Oracle Discoverer environment to modern, usable Cognos Analytics environment
Enable both IT and business users in Cognos Analytics through formal training

User Training & Adoption

Provide training sessions and interactive workshops to enable functional users and business stakeholders in Cognos Analytics areas
Leverage a “Day in the Life” approach to the training, which showcases the “what,” “how” and “why” of users’ everyday activities in the Cognos Analytics world

KEYS TO SUCCESS

The successful migration to Cognos Analytics allowed the client to:

Transition content and enable self-service capabilities to a better, faster BI platform
Reduce cost and risk exposure associated with maintaining an unsupported and insecure reporting system

Lower total Cost of Ownership for both the migrated reporting content and the platform itself
Improve content taxonomy allowing users to more easily identify the reports they needed

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