New Course Launch: Applying Visualizations in Cognos Explores the Cutting Edge of Business Analytics

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Ironside is excited to announce the launch of one of our most innovative and dynamic courses to date: Applying Visualizations in Cognos. Demonstrating our continued commitment to remaining at the forefront of business analytics education, this two-day course will help you unlock the true potential of your organization’s mission-critical data by showing you how to craft it into highly impactful, highly consumable visual formats using the IBM Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE). Read more

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Data Warehousing Basics

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Cognos makes extensive use of data warehousing concepts. Most data warehouses are built using dimensional modeling techniques (also known as the “Kimball style”). Data is divided into fact and dimension tables, which are joined together in star schemas. Restructuring data in this fashion takes a great deal of effort, both in planning and implementation. These types of changes are only done because they are necessary for high-quality analytics. Understanding more about how they work and why they are important can help make Cognos a more efficient and effective reporting tool. Read more

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Business Analytics with IBM Watson Content Analytics

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IBM estimates that most businesses utilize about 20% of the data they collect, with the other 80% of a company’s stored information remaining under-utilized or inaccessible.

Today, businesses are storing more data than ever before. Data is vital for record keeping and to provide competitive advantage through reporting and analysis tools. So why the low utilization? Read more

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Advanced Features of IBM SPSS Modeler Text Analytics

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Earlier this year, we published a newsletter article scratching the surface of the Text Analytics Premium add-on for IBM SPSS Modeler. It introduced the fundamentals of text analytics and the idea of extracting information from unstructured text data. In this follow-up article, we will dive more deeply into some of the more advanced topics to fully leverage the add-on’s functionalities. Read more

Ironside Webinar Series: Consumerizing Enterprise Analytics

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Consumerizing Enterprise Analytics

On August 26th, Ironside hosted a Consumerizing Enterprise Analytics, Better Outcomes Through Better User Experiences webinar,  exploring a patented approach that borrows from principals of user experience design and takes an introspective look at solving the most common business analytics problems encountered in an enterprise setting. Read more

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Ironside Tech Tip: Managing Performance Metrics in IBM Cognos 10

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As Business Intelligence (BI) systems become more and more embedded into the critical, analytics-based DNA of corporate decision-making, it is more important than ever to keep the system up and running at the highest level of efficiency. This article discusses methods for providing real-time monitoring and historical trending information for your system in the form of performance metrics. Read more

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How IBM Cognos Capabilities Are Translated into IBM User Based Licenses

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One question that Cognos Business Intelligence consultants often hear is “I bought licenses from IBM. How do I implement them in my user community and provide them with the various studios available in Cognos? There are so many studios, and I’m not sure which ones to give my users.”

The purpose of this article is to help your Cognos BI Administrator appropriately distribute user licenses and give access to licensed capabilities in IBM Cognos. There are four primary user license types: Enhanced Consumer, Advanced Business Author, Professional, and Administrator. One responsibility that generally lands on the IBM Cognos Administrator is to monitor the use of each purchased Cognos license. This is required to both maximize the utilization of the licenses and to make sure that the organization is in compliance with the IBM Cognos license agreement. The BI Professional role is for the technical developer/user who does not have administrative tasks. The BI Enhanced Consumer role is for consuming reports. Falling in between Enhanced Consumer and BI Professional is the Advanced Business Author, who has a need to both create and consume reports. Read more

Ironside Webinar Series: Transform Sales Performance Management with Dashboards

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On July 23rd, Ironside hosted a Transform Sales Performance Management with Dashboards webinar exploring how visualizations can inform and motivate sales organizations.

Topics covered include:

  • Common sales performance management (SPM) concerns and problems
  • Dashboard design best practices
  • SPM dashboarding demonstration

Read more

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Ironside Tech Tip: Creating a Burst Table for a Cognos Report

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Synopsis: How to create an external data file to use as a burst table for a Cognos report.

Pre-Requisites: This article assumes familiarity with how to burst a report and how to use external data, and creating an external data package. Read more

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Ironside Tech Tip: Leveraging Time and Aggregate Functions in Dimensional Reporting to Create Low Maintenance Cognos Reports

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Over the years I have successfully used the ancestor(), parallelPeriods(), periodToDate(), aggregate(), and set() dimensional functions to develop robust and durable dimensional reporting solutions in IBM Cognos BI.

I had the opportunity to go to lunch the other day with one of my clients from a few years ago and they told me that the profit and loss reports that I wrote for them were still in use. These reports used no year or month members (directly) and required little if any maintenance over the last two years, despite daily refreshes of the source PowerCube. Read more