Tag Archive for: IBM

compensation management pain points mazeWhether you are a Compensation Administrator, Account Executive, or Sales Manager, the process of paying people commissions and tracking their performance can be frustrating. I spent several years as an Administrator and worked with sales people, sales operations team members, executives, and many others. The following are the top 5 incentive compensation management pain points that I have discovered during those interactions: Read more

Great news for those on the West Coast, beginning in 2014 Ironside will offer a series of IBM Business Analytics public training classes in California! Ironside training offerings will include a variety of IBM Cognos, TM1, and SPSS training, taught by some of the best trainers in the industry. Classes will be held in Irvine with plans to expand to Central and North California.

Ironside training programs are geared toward providing customers with a complete and relevant educational experience, incorporating instructor led material, student focused workshops, and hands-on demos. Ironside Group’s training offerings lay a solid foundation for future development in all aspects of IBM Business Analytics.

If you are interested in attending an IBM Business Analytics training course in California you can attended one of the following training courses:

  • 2/17/2014 -Report Studio Fundamental and Advanced Training
  • 3/10/2014 -Framework manager Fundamentals & Advanced
  • 4/7/2014 – Cognos Administration Training
  • 4/10/2014 -Workspace & Workspace Advanced
  • 5/12/2014 -Dynamic Cubes Fast Track
  • 6/16/2014 – Report Studio Fundamentals & Advanced
  • 7/14/2014 – Framework Manager Fundamentals & Advanced
  • 8/11/2014 – Dynamic Cubes Fast Track

 

If you have any questions or to learn more about Ironside’s business analytics training, check out our full course catalog. You can also see our full list of public courses or investigate options for having a private course taught onsite at your organization.

clock graphicSecurity in Cognos is extremely robust, permitting or denying very precise access to data elements in a package, data source, or even to row level access in a database. Read & Execute permissions are usually applied to a report allowing certain Groups or Roles the ability to run a report. However, you can also allow or deny access to a report to only let it execute within specific hours of the day. Read more

Ironside is proud to announce the creation of the Ironside Solution Center; a dedicated on-shore team providing services to support our clients’ strategic development initiatives. In addition to client development initiatives, the Solution Center will spearhead the research and development of Ironside Solutions products. A full-time core team of skilled consultants staff the Solution Center from our Lexington, MA office and business vertical and subject matter experts from within our organization augment the team when needed to rapidly scale and meet client project needs.

Service Offerings

Ironside provides two key services through the Ironside Solution Center: a project-based offering and an enhanced managed services offering.

– The project based offering is a time and material model where the hours and costs are determined by the scope of the project and skills required.
– The enhanced managed services offering allows the client to purchase blocks of time on a periodic basis, e.g. annually or quarterly, and consume those blocks within a predefined timeframe.

Engagement Model

The Ironside Solution Center Manager is a dedicated resource involved in all services that the core team provides, reviewing specifications, work plans, deliverables, and time tables with an onsite Ironside project manager or client project manager. The Solution Center Manager engages Solution Center resources as needed on a per-project basis.

Communication is paramount in this model, and the Solution Center Manager tracks project plans, provides status updates, and ensures quality of work to guarantee the timely delivery of cost-effective solutions to Ironside clients.

Considerations for Ironside Solution Center Engagements

If any of the following considerations are a priority for your company, the Solutions Center could be of great benefit to you:

– Large scale development or upgrades
– Bulk QA or report remediation
– Budget constraints for travel and expenses
– High quality deliverables without the expense of multiple boutique consultant resources
– Dedicated resources for your hosted / managed environments

Solution Center Benefits

A number of crucial advantages come along with engaging the Ironside Solution Center. Below are some highlights:

– Flexibility and predictability in budgeting based upon engagement model
– Local in-house development environment managed by a senior dedicated resource
– Lower travel and expense costs
– Potential to expand expertise / skills / footprint as projects evolve
– Wealth of knowledge from the entire Ironside Consulting Services organization
– Project management tools, templates, processes and methodology

Meet the Team

All members of the core team are IBM Certified in various skillsets and are based out of our corporate headquarters in Lexington, MA.

Solution Center Manager – De Hsieh

de hsiehDe is a senior consultant for Ironside, and is an ideal fit for leading the Solution Center team. He has an unmatched insight into the complexities, challenges, and best practices associated with a vast array of different industries and functional areas. During his six year tenure with Ironside, De has used his in-depth expertise with every aspect of the IBM Cognos suite to quickly and effectively devise and deploy solutions for clients, even in the most complex enterprise environments. With an impressive history of diverse, dynamic projects under his belt, De can speak the language of end users and stakeholders of all types and transform goals and requirements into usable, actionable, and productive results that put companies on the cutting edge of their sector.

Solution Center Core Team: Technical Consultants

The Ironside Solution Center team is a group of driven, innovative, and highly knowledgeable consultants who will do everything possible to make your organization’s key projects successful. Each member below brings a unique set of capabilities to the table that they are proud to leverage in service of Ironside’s clients.

Pankti Shah

Pankti Shah

Aimee Carvalho

aimee carvalho

Katie Ketcham

katie ketcham

Bernadette Kennedy-Cox

bernadette kennedy-cox

Sagarr Kanoje

Sagarr Kanoje

 Conclusion

The Ironside Solution Center provides our clients with the benefits of a cost-effective, flexible project delivery model that guarantees the security of their data within a US based development center. In addition, the Solution Center grants our clients the confidence and peace of mind necessary to execute on key strategic deliverables that help them stay competitive in a modern, information-focused business environment. If you’d like to learn more about the team and what they can offer your organization, check out the Solution Center team page.

 

Utilize IBM SPSS Statistics and R to Produce a Combination Correlation Table and Graphs

IBM SPSS Statistics is very powerful software that allows complex data analyses to be performed. R is a very useful software environment that provides a coding language tailored to statistical operations. This article will give an outline of the procedure to enable the use of SPSS Statistics and R to add even more functionality to the use of SPSS Statistics. The example that will be used is generation of a combination correlation table and various graphs using this integration. Read more

IBM Business Analytics North America Partner AwardLexington, MA (November 1, 2013) – Ironside has  been named the IBM Business Analytics North America Business Partner Excellence Award winner for 2013. Ironside will receive the award at IBM’s Information on Demand Conference on November 2 in Las Vegas.

The award recognizes the IBM Business Analytics North America Business Partner that has delivered exceptional solutions using IBM products and service in the business analytics space. Read more

Difficulty: Easy

Required Ingredients: Prompt macros and static values within a prompt parameter.

Scenario:

You have some existing reports that prompt on Year and Month.

Users would like a better experience by having default selections provided for them. For scheduling purposes you’d also like to set relative time so the report can run based on current month and current year. You can accomplish this using macros. Read more

IOD 2012 was once again another successful and productive event for the Ironside Group! We want to personally thank those who stopped by our booth during the conference and we hope that you had an educational experience at IOD 2012.

On Sunday, October 21st, the Ironside Group won an IBM Business Analytics Circle of Excellence Award at the Business Partner Summit where we were highlighted for our work with customer, By Appointment Only, (BAO, INC.) You can view the entire presentation here, and view the segment where our work was recognized at 13:59. Click here to read more on how we helped BAO, Inc. improve their sales by 25%. Read more

Join us at noon eastern daylight time (EDT) on June 25, and learn how Symmons Industries outperforms with analytics-driven reporting.

In the never-ending pursuit of keeping or gaining a competitive edge, your ability to extract greater value from information can make all the difference. Yet traditional reporting approaches can limit users’ visibility into key metrics and performance indicators that are needed for optimizing decisions. And this poor visibility affects the already overworked IT department, which has to find ways to meet users’ needs.

Join us for the IBM TechTalk event on June 25 to see how IBM client Symmons Industries was able to meet order demands in real time and make its lean manufacturing processes outperform using an IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10 solution—and how IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10 software can help you bypass traditional reporting challenges.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how comprehensive business intelligence (BI) reporting and dashboarding capabilities can deliver immense business value by giving your users the information they need to support better decisions.

Register now for the June 25 TechTalk web seminar.

Date: June 25, 2012

Time: Noon EDT

Register Here