Infosys

Cognos Self Service BI

Infosys

Cognos Self Service BI

March, 2014

INFOSYS LIMITED
Bhubaneswar

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2014 Infosys Limited, India

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Cognos Self Service BI

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Cognos Self Service BI

Author: Venkata Danthuluri, Kaumod Mishra

Date written (MM/DD/YYYY):

17/03/2014

Project Details

Project(s) Code: NMFPADT2

H/W Platform: Windows OS
S/W Environment: COGNOS 10
Application Type: Software
Project Type: Development

Declaration
I/We hereby declare that this document is based on my/our personal experiences
and/or experiences of my/our project members. To the best of my/our knowledge,
this document does not contain any material that infringes the copyrights of any other
individual or organization including the customers of Infosys. The image used in my
document was purely developed by myself without any external references/documents
or other user manuals.
Venkata Danthuluri, Kaumod Mishra
Target readers: Cognos Users

Keywords: Self Service BI, Forresters Report, Analytical Function, Cognos

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Cognos Self Service BI

Self Service BI: Overview
The specific function designed within the BI environment to give BI users the ability to become
more capable and less relied on IT.
To meet this emerging need and improve time to build, companies are looking for different
choices to BI. One such approach is to build the infrastructure that support the BI environment in
which the Power users can collaborate specific sets of BI reports, Dashboards , Logic and
analytics with less dependence on IT.
The advantage of self Service BI is to extend the scope of BI applications to address a wider
range of business users and help them solve the needs and problems of complex scenarios. At
the same time, this extension must support the information workers need for a personalized and
collaborative decision making framework.
Four key objective of Self Service BI:

it easy to use
it easy to access data
DW solution fast to manage and deploy
BI results easy to consume and enhance

IT should act as
enabler and give
control

Strong User
Community

In memory Caching
Rich Semantic
Layers

Building
Right
Mindset

Best
Practices

Make
Make
Make
Make

Technolog
y Enablers

1)
2)
3)
4)

Process
Maturity

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Governance Mode
Clearly Defined roles
l

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Cognos Self Service BI

Self Service BI: Challenges

Implementing Self Service BI is more difficult than BI professionals anticipate.
The challenge with self service

IT doesnt
have the
bandwidth to
respond to
each
request
Differing
user
requirements

IT wants
control and
users want
the
Capability
to do what
The Balance
they want

If IT
doesnt
respond,
users take
measures
Users into
canttheir
afford
own
hands
to wait

Differing User Requirements: Business requirements keep changing. BI Solutions must be implemented
quickly to take advantage business strategy. Time to market solution is the key to Self Service BI
Solutions success.
The Balance: Self-service BI requires clean, comprehensive and integrated data
Few Key Factors for the right balance is

Know your audience: There is no One size fits all solution in BI.Different BI users need different
type of solution to suit their needs. Different business user interprets data differently
Training: Significant number of Self Service BI Solutions fails because of proper training. Training
doesnt pass on the exact know-how of the Tool and data.
BI Tools: BI Developers needs the ability and functionality to create reports and dashboards
however the BI Power users or casual users need the Tool features and functionality to be simple
and easy to navigate through. In Majority of cases Self Service BI Solutions have often
implemented a good BI tool but have not able to reap the benefits of self-service BI.
Data Governance :
a) Poor Data Quality: Inconsistent definition of the same metric has been a critical reason for poor
data quality. The same metric may have different definitions across different departments of the
same organization. The definitions or KPI can be created based on functional rules which are
based on functional rules which are same across the whole organization.
b) Data Integration: Data Integration rules comes into picture when data has not been formatted
before aggregating
c) Logical Errors: Logical errors are an extension of the data integration issue where a KPI or
metric definition is taken out of content to do the analysis.

User cant afford to wait:

Traditional centralized BI is largely responsible for the development of self-service tools, since it
required a heavy reliance on IT and lengthy waiting times for reporting about historical trends.

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Solution: Get Self-service Right! Training should involve Functionalities of the tool and which data
elements and fields can help them with their analysis. It should also include the security policies
recommendations

Why Self Service is required in Todays World

This trend of Self Service BI was started by Business objects with Web Intelligence and was marketed as
Ad-Hoc reporting tool. This tool did provide business user the capability of Self Service BI, however
packed with powerful features; it became difficult for business user to understand queries and
functionality.
With changing times and usage patterns features of BI has changed .Over the past decade BI has
evolved from the crude Integrated Development environment to tools which have been easy to use and
navigate.
Increasing costs of BI implementations and timely deployments have the core reason which made BI
Solutions difficult for organizations to use and thereby exploit its value for improving business strategies
in todays tough economic environment.
BI user self-service has come out as an effective way of overcoming these impediments to BI growth. To
be effective, however, BI self-service must be done at scale that is it must be able to cope with the
constant challenges of growth and technology advances. Business users or analyst can now use these
tools to analyze the data, create reports and dashboard.
Primary reasons why Self Service BI is required:

Next Generation Solutions: Support provided by BI tools for smart analytics and dashboard using
the Big Data
Time to Value: BI Solutions needs to be applied quickly to take advantage of changing business
scenario
Cost Optimization: Optimized hardware and software solutions with lot of built for purpose
Analytical solutions help business with less IT intervention.
Data Understanding: Self Service BI Tools provide lot of visualization features which help them
understand the data better. They can create any number of graphs, charts and analytical
functions which help them see the data better.
Implementing self-service BI necessitates a completely decentralized approach in which each
department (or user) has complete autonomy and operates as a silo.

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Cognos Self Service BI

Self Service BI: Cognos vs. Other Platforms:

IBM (Cognos) offers the broadest and the most balanced set of self-service features. With the recent
rollout of Cognos Insight, IBM is now front and center in the self- service BI market

Cognos Self Service BI Features and advantages:

1) All users : Cognos Self Service BI features provide the comfort level to both Casual and power
user and Simple to complex analysis to understand how the business is performing
2) Flexible access for decisions at the point of impact : Support where and how users choose to
work
3) Any data for a complete view of the information needed to make business decisions
4) Enterprise-class platform to support self-service
5) Support collaboration and action at the team or enterprise level
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6) Build custom dashboards and applications without scripting

Cognos Self Service BI

Whats New in Cognos 10.2

Active Reports:

New Controls in Active Report

Simplified authoring to connect objects

Passwords for Active Report

Content Archival:

Archive and retrieve report output with Enterprise Content management Integration

Leaner/faster Cognos Content store as less reports outputs need to be maintained

Dynamic Query Mode extends support to :

Relational Data Sources

DMR (Dimensionally Modelled Relational)

Business Workspace:

Active Report inside Business workspace Dashboards

RTM experience improved

Better UI performance

Dynamic Cubes

100% in memory OLAP Engine for a high Performance

Aggregate Awareness to allow query routing to in-memory or physical aggregate table in the
data warehouse.

Aggregate Advisor feature will monitor, suggest new physical aggregate tables to suit
performance requirement and even generate SQL/DDL.

Security aware caching options.

Support for Big Data and integration with IBM Info Sphere Big Insights (Hadoop).

Native support for ERP vendors.

Cognos 10.2 now supports integrated content archiving.

All the components on IBM Cognos 10.2 are 64-bit

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Cognos Self Service BI

Cognos Workspace :

Tab Controls : Create Multi Tabbed Workspace

Tab Trigger : New control called an Action Button which you can program to trigger tab changes

Column Freeze : Users familiar with Excel will find lot of navigation and features similar like can
now Freeze and Unfreeze column and row heading when scrolling

Chart Options: Data Visualization Guide called Visual Recommender will allow users select the
appropriate chart type based on data values , including reason for that suggesting the Chart
type.

Cognos Active Reports :

Smart Metadata : New built-in algorithm automatically recognize hierarchy structure & rearranges upon import

Fiscal Year & Populate Whole Year: While importing data, you can set your fiscal year to
begin at a specified month.

Drill-up/Drill down in chart: Cognos Active report offers drill-up & drill-down features. User
can now drag a data item to chart from a crosstab or content pane.

Top/Bottom Filtering : You can now filter cross tab to show only the top or bottom results

Cognos: Self Service BI:

Value addition to Business and IT:
Faster and Easy to Explore and Share without IT intervention

Independent Analysis, performance and flexibility

Collaborate and Combine any data from spreadsheets to managed data.

What if scenario modeling with pre-built calculations and comparisons, data spreading,
annotations

Avoid rework users should leverage any existing BI content.

Avoid silos - Users work with in a governed and automated deployment.

Avoid dead ends: Can extend personalized analytics Framework to predictive, managed
reporting, performance management.
Reference(s)
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Cognos Self Service BI

This document is prepared based on personal experience and reference from below
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/analytics/ba-summit/

2014 Infosys Limited, India

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