,

IBM Cognos TM1 Integration with IBM Cognos BI

/by

What are the IBM Cognos TM1 Integration Points?

IBM Cognos TM1 is fast becoming a critical component of the IBM business analytics suite of offerings. As the application becomes more prevalent in the industry, we are seeing more and more customers inquiring about the integration points between IBM Cognos TM1 and the IBM Cognos BI suite of tools. There are six common integration points between TM1 9.5.2 and IBM Cognos BI:

-IBM Cognos BI Security
-Utilization of previously developed TM1 Web content within the Cognos Connection interface through TM1 Portlets
-TM1 cubes as a data source within the IBM Cognos BI environment
-TM1 Widgets
-TM1 cubes as a source within the IBM Cognos BIA studio
-IBM Cognos TM1 Package Connector to access IBM Cognos Framework Manager packages

Read more

,

Ironside Group Heads South for Cognos Insight & March Madness Roadshow

/by

Self-service or personal analytics is in high demand yet studies indicate business intelligence adoption continues to be a challenge?  Business users need an easy way to combine and analyze data in real time that helps them make more informed decisions to improve financial performance.

On February 7th, IBM announced its new data discovery solution, IBM Cognos Insight.  Discovery analytics empowers business users to import multiple sources of data (Excel, etc.) to easily explore, visualize and interact with data, perform scenario analyses and share insights. IBM Cognos Insight helps transform ever growing amounts of data into more useful and actionable information. IBM Cognos Insight can be used stand alone on your desktop or become part of your Cognos Express or Enterprise deployment.

Attend an IBM Cognos Insight March Madness Tour Stop

Join us in a city near you for a short presentation on this exciting new offering that truly differentiates IBM business analytics from the rest.  Lunch or dinner will be served and schedule permitting, enjoy viewing the March Madness basketball tournament.

If you are interested in learning more about these events, please reach out to Kristin Brown at kbrown ironsidegroup .

The Importance of Planning Ahead

/by

As a new year approaches, new projects and initiatives within organizations of all types and sizes begin to surface. In order to ensure on-time completion and delivery of projects, it is crucial for organizations to always be looking ahead. As many IT teams are already feeling the squeeze of a heavy workload, managing expectations of business sponsors can be difficult.

Recently, Ironside Group spent time working with a life sciences organization in Massachusetts on an upgrade to Cognos 10. Although the initiative is slated to begin in early 2012, Ironside Group made it a point to begin the process in October to ensure on-time delivery for this time sensitive project. Since Ironside Group had no previous relationship with the client, Ironside made it a point to better understand their business by meeting with key business units within the organization who rely on Cognos daily. With IT’s help, Ironside quickly understood the importance of Cognos within the organization and started to generate an upgrade project plan. Read more

,

Cloud Solutions for IBM Cognos Business Analytics

/by

The Ironside Group invites you to reduce the burden on your IT and accelerate your time to value by hosting your IBM Cognos Business Analytics application on our cloud computing environment.

When an organization begins to embark upon a Business Analytics initiative, they face several challenges including budget, lack of experienced resources and negotiations between the line of business and an overburdened IT department. In an effort to bridge the gap between line of business and IT, reduce the total cost of ownership and accelerate the time to value, The Ironside Group now offers a scalable, secure and reliable enterprise class cloud computing environment. Read more

,

IBM Cognos Tabbed Report Design

/by

Often times developers will get a request to create several different variations of a single report. While this can be done with user prompting or even multiple versions of a report, another option would be to create tabs within a report which would allow for the user to easily switch between variations. In this month’s tech tip we’ll go over how to create this using drill-throughs, a string variable and a conditional block.

The first step is to identify what tabs you’ll want to display. Each one of the tabs will need to be set up individually. In our example (sample included) we’ll use the seven days of the week.

Read more

IBM Information on Demand 2011 – Ironside Giveaways and Events

/by

Sunday October 23rd– Thursday October 27th

Flip Video Ultra HD The Ironside Group is proud to be a Gold Sponsor & Exhibitor at the Information on Demand Conference at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. We will be hosting numerous events throughout the week, including a private cocktail and dinner party on Monday evening. Please visit the Ironside Group’s booth which is located at #G1009 in the Business Analytics section on the main EXPO floor for a chance to win a Flip Video Camera or a $500 AMEX Gift card. The booth will be staffed daily with members of our sales and technical team. If you are attending IOD and are interested in scheduling a meeting with us, joining us at our private dinner event. Need advice about which IOD events would be best suited for you? Contact Kristin Brown at [email protected] or 781-860-8840, and she will be happy to provide you with more information. For more information regarding Information on Demand 2011, please visit the event website http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/2011-conference/ .

$500 Amex Gift Card

Making Business Insight Dashboard Components with Report Studio

/by

Dashboarding with Business Insight

Business Insight is a new tool in Cognos 10. With it, pieces of existing reports can be combined into interactive dashboards. This allows users with less report authoring experience to create dashboards using components from more complex reports. (Business Insight should not be confused with Business Insight Advanced, a report creation tool alongside Report Studio or Query Studio that was also introduced in Cognos 10).

While Business Insight can use nearly any report item (chart, list, crosstab, etc.), there are some techniques and best practices which can make these items more “Business Insight friendly”. Read more

Embed Google Maps in IBM Cognos Reports

/by

IBM Cognos has a built-in map functionality that provides great visualization. With multiple layers on each map you can display data at different levels and even create drill throughs to other reports. It is a nice feature to visually present your data. However, everything has its limitations. There are some rich map features that IBM Cognos maps may not be able to provide; such as adding additional content dynamically onto the map, searching, on-demand zoom in/out, actual location, overlays, better mobile device support, etc.  Google Maps is one of the leading online free map services that many web users like you are using daily. Today, with globalization of business many companies have offices all over the world. So it becomes a very natural request from your business users: can we put our business data on Google Maps so that we can easily see how our branch offices perform globally? Or in other words, can we place Google Maps inside our Cognos reports? Before we get to the answer, let’s first take a look whether this is even a technical possibility.
Read more

Making the Most of IBM Information On Demand (IOD)

/by

It is that time of the year again! On October 23rd – 27th, IBM will be hosting its second annual Business Analytics Forum at IBM’s Information On Demand Conference in Las Vegas. This year’s docket includes over 200 Business Analytics sessions as well as 100’s of hands-on technical workshops. The topics will range from Business Analytics on the Cloud to to Business Analytics in Social Media, and much more in between. The presenters will include IBM’s best and brightest, as well as customers from organizations leading the way in Business Analytics. In addition to these presentations IBM also offers complimentary certification testing, industry specific birds-of-a-feather sessions to share experiences, and one-on-one executive visits.

The expansive content and learning opportunities at this event are very impressive. In previous years some of our customers have mentioned feeling overwhelmed and struggled to determine how to make the best use of their time. Here are a few quick tips to make the most out of this great opportunity Read more

NECUG Meeting Sept 22, 2011 Littleton, MA

/by



NECUG Meeting

September 22nd, 2011

Littleton, MA

Agenda

8:30 – 9:00 am Registration

9:00 am – 9:15 am Welcome and Introduction

9:15 – 10:00
am Dashboard Design Tips

(Featuring IBM Cognos 8.4 and a SQL Server Database)

Presenter(s): Greg Novotony, Architect, Enterprise Business Intelligence & Analytics

Greg will discuss best practices for designing dashboards and will build a stacked portal page on the fly.
(stacked, meaning one portal page nested inside another)The portal will have both horizontal and vertical tabs (allows user 1 point of entry for 30-40 pre-run reports) The underlying reports will be visually appealing (increases user adoption) and will include a combination of object types (list, crosstabs, charts, heatmaps,etc.)The underlying reports will be pre-run, but may include drill through links to more detailed data

10:00 – 10:45 am Automating Administration & the BI Life-Cycle

(Featuring MotioCI 2.1 & MotioPI 2.5)

Presenter(s): Adam Bonneau Senior Software Developer & Lead Feature Developer at Motio Duke University: BSE Civil Engineering, BS Economics, BA Public Policy, Honor Societies Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, & Chi Epsilon;

Founded in 1999, Motio is the leader and largest 3rd party Cognos software technology provider; building solutions targeted at automating and address standard Cognos process and challenges. All uniquely innovated (some weakly imitated) our solutions range from 100% and Complete BI Change Management, Automatic Report Testing, and Cognos Stress Testing, to Cognos Admin Utility Solutions, Mass Report Spec Analysis and Documentation, and BI Output Storage and Retention.  With thousands of software customers, ranging from mom-and-pop to Fortune 10, and the largest Cognos customers in the world, our applications are designed to scale, address broad BI challenges, and deliver to any organization seeking better managed and more effective BI.

10:45 am Break

11:00 am Data Virtualization

Presenter(s): Jason Hull

11:45 am IBM??

12:00 pm Lunch Networking

12:45 – 1:30 pm “Ask The Experts” Round Table

1:30-2:15 pm Predictive Analytics with IBM SPSS Modeler

Presenter(s): Daniel Hess, Jing Yin, Technical Consultant at The Ironside Group

(Featuring IBM SPSS Modeler 14)

Jing will discuss how organizations can take advantage of the predictive power of data mining to automate decisions to achieve business goals and deliver better results. The presentation will include a demo session to show how to use IBM SPSS Modeler to build a data mining stream to quickly identity trends behind the data. The demo will highlight on some of the advanced features of SPSS Modeler including automated data preparation and modeling, result visualization, IBM Cognos integration etc.