IBM Cognos Express: Providing a wealth of

business analytics capabilities

In today’s scenario we’re going to play the role of a marketing analyst who works for a company
that has had rapid growth over their recent history after their initial product became very
successful. In the past, they managed their business mostly with spreadsheets, but on a number
of occasions they have had to put right actions that in retrospect should have been addressed
earlier. To do so they have started with a high-value project of tracking profitability of their
product lines. They are now looking to review the performance of a product which was very
recently released to market as they expand their product lines.

To do so, we’re going to be using numerous capabilities provided by the Cognos Express
offering. Within this one console I have access to enterprise-caliber reporting, dashboarding and
ad-hoc querying capabilities of Cognos BI, along with the planning, budgeting, forecasting and
scorecarding capabilities of Cognos TM1 all within a single interface. At the same time, Cognos
Express has been designed to be easily managed so that connecting data sources and configuring
security can be done within the centralized administration console.

Let’s begin by reviewing our performance metrics within a dashboard created in Cognos
Workspace. Our fictitious company has recently released a new product to market and is looking
to gain insight about how successful we’ve been over the last three quarters, and what we should
expect moving forward. Our last product’s success was driven largely by word of mouth as we
had limited marketing resources. As such, we’re very focused on customer satisfaction.

Let’s examine a word cloud to review our customer feedback, where I can see that although our
customers are saying that our company is innovative, there are some questions about the quality
of our new product which needs improvement. This is of great concern to us as an organization
which prides itself on producing premium goods. This word cloud is an example of one of the
visualization options created using the new Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (known as
Rave). This extensible visualization solution allows authors to meet demands for new
visualizations that allows organizations to be agile in their customization for different scenarios
or user groups. I can continue by checking on our pipeline health to ensure that our qualified
leads on are target using the waterfall chart, or examine our sales by region using the new tree
map visualization, both created using RAVE with visualizations downloaded from
AnalyticsZone.

Continuing with this scenario, I can see that although our new product has been selling quite
well, it seems as though our forecasted revenue is trending downward. Here we’re leveraging
the predictive and data mining capabilities of SPSS Modeler to uncover relationships in the data
that a human could not as easily discover. We’ve forecast our revenue using a predictive model
and are using the output as the data source for this report. Leveraging predictive analytics allows
organizations to be proactive, anticipating outcomes or behaviors. This is the same technology

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used in large banks to predict fraudulent credit card activity or telco companies to better
understand customer churn. So when predictive analytics are deployed within operational
systems, the results can impact wider audiences and enhance the way things get done, which in
turn leads to greater returns on the investment. With these insights, we want to try to understand
what could be the cause for this negative customer feedback and downward sales projections and
take the necessary corrective action.

The first step that I’ll want to do is review our organization’s business strategy to ensure that our
operations align to our business goals. This is easily done in Cognos Express with scorecarding.
A scorecard is a collection of information called performance metrics that are designed to reflect
the goals. These metrics show how the objects are being met by comparing planned to actual
results. These scorecarding capabilities visually capture organizational strategy so that
departments and employees can set priorities and track progress with status indicators. We can
improve accountability by assigning primary owners for each metric. Scorecards help you
define, monitor and manage your company’s critical metrics. By translating tactics and
strategies into specific, measurable objectives, scorecards help link corporate strategy to
operations and ensure that goals are consistently defined, understood, and communicated.

Let’s review our scorecard by looking at the strategy map within Cognos Insight. By leveraging
Cognos Insight, I can explore and visualize my analysis without IT assistance. In just a few
clicks of the mouse, business analysts, managers and executives alike can independently explore
and update personal and corporate data on their desktops and instantly publish dashboards and
applications that others can contribute to as well as consume. With Insight’s drag-and-drop
functionality, it supports merging multiple data sets together into a single view in a personalized
workspace.

So in my scenario, as a business who prides itself on quality we believe there is a strong

correlation or influence on the role that good quality products plays in increasing customer
satisfaction and in turn higher profit.

Continuing with my scenario, scorecard metrics are not just a read-only data source. Users can
create a sandbox to plan the next best action to take. I can begin to do some what-if analysis by
comparing different scenarios on how our business will be impacted by adjusting some of our
metrics between Q3 and Q4. We are not on track to make our revenue targets in Q3, so we’re
going to lower our target knowing that by taking corrective action we can make up the difference
in Q4. So I’ll drop our revenue target to 800K. Because this is a central model, other people can
have access to this information right away to evaluate the impact to other areas of the business
such as cash flow.

In our scenario, I can see how the trends are affected in both the strategy map and impact
diagram by using the in-memory engine with write-back capability. These visualizations clearly
communicate the results in a simple and intuitive way. Users can walk through the impact
diagram from a high level goal, down to a level of detail which they can impact. This ensures
that the actions taken by individuals across the board are consistent with that of the overall

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objectives. You’ll notice that not all of the impacts are financial drivers. Customer churn, for
example could, in the case of education, be attrition. Like, being above target is not always
desirable. In our case, I also want to strive to maintain quality which is tightly tied to the quality
of good we use in our bill of material. Here we need to increase our Cost of Goods Sold,
because in this case our customer feedback has suggested that we might be skimping on inputs to
our product. We want to correct this by purchasing higher quality components to produce a
higher quality good. I can then interact with the impact diagram to examine how negative
customer satisfaction can lead to increased customer churn which leads to decreased revenue.

Once I’m happy with the changes that I’ve made to my scorecard, I can commit this change
which will notify my boss that I’m suggesting with focus more on quality by increasing the cost
of goods sold, which will ultimately return a higher profit. And as you can imagine, executives
are always on the move so my boss isn’t in the office by they’ll be able to review this change on
their iPad and approve my go-forward strategy as it aligns with our organizations business plan.
Now I’ve really moved these insights into action.

Finally, I’ll want to share these insights with my wider BI audience by using the “publish and
distribute” feature within Cognos Insight, which will package all of this content together so that
others can further collaborate. Once that’s done, others can then add these metrics to augment
their existing dashboards such as the one in which we begin this scenario. Those other
stakeholders can consume this insight via the web portal or on their mobile devices so they can
take action from the point of impact.

So just to recap what you’ve seen here, we began by reviewing our performance within a unified
dashboard in Cognos Workspace and identified a number of alarming metrics that we wanted to
correct using predictive data from our SPSS data source. Then we used the interactivity, write-
back and scorecarding capabilities within Cognos Insight to take the necessary course correcting
actions. And most importantly, we were able to leverage all of these capabilities as a result of
the ease of use, ease of deployment, and ease of administration of Cognos Express, which affords
businesses these capabilities while decreasing the burden on IT of a large enterprise
implementation. Using Cognos Express will allow businesses to start small with using these
business analytics capabilities and grow the BI and PM solution over time in order to meet goals
and objectives, ultimately making smarter decisions.

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2014

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Produced in the United States of America

March 2014

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