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Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Overview
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence is the only BI product to deliver the complete range of BI capabilities: reporting, analysis, scorecarding, dashboards, business event management as well as data integration, on a single, proven architecture.
Easy to integrate, deploy and use, Cognos 8 BI delivers a simplified BI environment that improves user adoption, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale foundation for performance management.
BI software that delivers more value with less complexity:
- Deliver all BI capabilities from a single product
- Serve all users with BI that matches their needs
- Leverage all corporate data
Deliver all BI capabilities from a single product
- Single product and architecture with all capabilities: Reporting, analysis, scorecards, dashboards, business event management, as well as data integration.
- Simplified maintenance: Zero-footprint, browser-based deployment and administration. No duplication among BI capabilities.
- Increase BI adoption: One product meets the needs of your entire user base, from casual users to power users.
- Proven integration: Web services architecture simplifies deployment and administration. Single, open API lets you integrate with existing security, portals, and IT infrastructure. No single point of failure.
Serve all users with BI that matches their needs
- BI consumers: Deliver pixel-perfect reports to their desktops with secure Web portal access adaptable to mobile devices.
- Senior executives: Deliver scorecarding, dashboards, and reports for quick communication of complex data.
- Business managers: Deliver all BI capabilities, with drag-and-drop simplicity and the same zero-footprint interface.
- Professional authors/analysts: Deliver advanced features such as high-volume burst reports for distribution, full range of report elements and output types, and reporting and analysis against relational or multidimensional sources.
IT administrators: Deliver a zero-footprint, browser-based environment, modular deployment, consistent metadata, and access to all corporate data on a Web services
Leverage all corporate data
- Open data strategy and common metadata: Common business rules, calculations, and filters consolidate your heterogeneous data into a consistent business view.
- Direct access: Leverage the information directly from existing sources including relational, OLAP, and other multidimensional data.
- EII: Access multiple disparate data sources in batch, historic, or real time. Use the built-in Enterprise Information Integration (EII) capability or third-party integration technologies.
- ETL: Integrate, cleanse, transform, and aggregate data for a consolidated historical view. A dimensional framework provides information formatted in the way business users think and optimized for all BI capabilities.
Business intelligence software that lets you work the way you want to:
- Work with information your way
- Business intelligence that fits your role
- See all the data you need
Work with information your way
Cognos 8 BI supplies the complete range of information and capabilities you need to support your decisions and guide your work day.
- Stay connected: Use managed reports, scorecards, dashboards, and alerts.
- Find the answers: Build reports and queries to address your questions.
- Explore trends: Perform in-depth, comparative analysis.
Business intelligence that fits your role
- Information you need: Depending on your job, you may need regular reports, vital signs at-a-glance, up-to-date reports, or the ability to dive more deeply into information. Use information the way you want.
- Presented for you: Get the portal and UI that fits your needs, rather than a generic one for highly technical users.
- Better collaboration: Everyone using the same system and common data increases collaboration across roles and functions.
See all the data you need
- Complete access to your data: Connect systems such as operations, resources, customers, and finance to deliver a common business view of your data and answer all your questions.
- Data consistency: Gain a single business view of your corporate data. Be confident that you and your colleagues are working with the same numbers.
- Reduce your time to action: Unite your corporate data, so departments, divisions, and business units can easily share information from different sources. Spend less time gathering information or reconciling incompatible data.
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence Capabilities
Reporting
A single, adaptive authoring environment for the full range of reports.
- Create managed business reports, production reports, dashboards, and ad hoc queries.
- Report against all operational systems, OLAP, and relational data sources.
- Publish reports in all desired formats: Email, HTML, PDF, Microsoft Excel, CSV, and XML.
- Offload IT effort and reduce reporting backlog through drag-and-drop formatting and user self-service.
- Support for Unicode addresses multilingual reporting needs.
- Proven scalability to hundreds of thousands of users.
Analysis
Explore and analyze large volumes of data with fast and predictable response times.
- Analyze all data, using OLAP or dimensionally aware relational sources.
- Perform deep comparative analysis of business performance across multiple dimensions (time, product, customer, etc.).
- Analyze large, complex data sets with an easy-to-use, drag-and drop user interface, pivoting, and filtering.
Scorecarding
Link initiatives to strategy with metrics and strategy maps.
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- At-a-glance view of performance against targets.
- Ensure accountability by linking metrics to owners.
- Understand performance trends with direct access to reports and analysis.
- Out-of-the-box initiative tracking to manage corrective actions.
- Use metric data to drive your enterprise planning for integrated performance management.
Dashboards
Deliver information from different sources in a single visual report.
- Provide an at-a-glance snapshot of business performance.
- Shorten time to decisions with multi-object performance reports, maps, charts, scorecards, lists, and interactive OLAP analysis.
- Create personalized information centers to monitor performance.
- Connect dashboard elements with underlying data for further reporting and analysis.
- Support management methodologies such as Six Sigma.
Business event management
Automate the detection and management of important business events.
- Monitor operational systems to detect business process events.
- Set alerts and deliver time-critical information to decision-makers across departments and locations.
- Reduce time-to-action and enable fact-based issue resolution.
- Manage events throughout their lifecycle until they are resolved.
Data integration
With extract, transform, and load (ETL) capability, deliver a data warehouse ready for analysis and reporting.
- Built on a dimensional framework to provide information based on the way business users think.
- Optimized for Cognos 8 BI capabilities.
- Lets you leverage and enhance your investments in third-party tools.
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
Cognos Go! Search Service
Cognos Go! Search Service is a new BI search capability that enables users to find information stored in Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.
With a familiar, browser-based search bar, sophisticated ranking of results, and the ability to easily fine-tune those results, users now have the most intuitive and efficient way of quickly finding the most relevant BI information.
Cognos Go! Search Service
Search relational, OLAP, and unstructured data
Cognos Go! searches a broad array of BI content and data sources, including:
- Relational data sources supported by Cognos 8 BI MR1.
- ERP data sources such as SAP BW, SAP R/3 and Siebel CRM.
- Unstructured and modern data sources available through the Composite Information Server.
- OLAP sources including Cognos PowerCubes®, Microsoft Analysis Services, and IBM DB2 OLAP/Essbase.
- Cognos Planning and Cognos Finance cubes, through the CDS adapter.
- Cognos Go! indexes hierarchies, dimensions, categories and metadata for measures.
- Metadata for reports or analyses built using Cognos 8 BI capabilities with OLAP data sources.
Make BI widely available to more people
With Cognos Go!, users gain access to BI content through a familiar search environment. Users can access the service in four ways:
- Through the Cognos Connection portal.
- Through third-party portals such as IBM Websphere and Plumtree.
- Through the Cognos Software Developer Kit (SDK).
- Through third-party enterprise search engines.
- In any task-based interface within Cognos 8 BI
Value for IT
Search provides welcome functionality for IT, including:
- Increased user self-service and a reduced report creation backlog. &Mac183; Reduced creation of redundant reports, as users can easiliy find reports that already exist.
- Built on open standards; can easily be integrated into any portal application.
- Administrative control over search targets and indexing for tailoring to specific environments.
- Less workload, since IT will not need to create and maintain drill paths between related reports.
- A consistent Cognos 8 security model. Cognos Go! is an integrated part of Cognos 8 BI and uses the Cognos 8 BI security model. Users will be only granted access to the reports, metrics, and analysis that they have been given permission to view.
Value for Business users
Cognos Go! delivers the business intelligence that users need to make better decisions:
- Easy search: search full data content of reports, as well as titles, descriptions, and metadata layers. Fuzzy matching and word stemming helps users fine-tune search terms and eliminate ambiguity.
- Most relevant data: sophisticated ranking and contextual support of search criteria delivers the most relevant data. Customers can find related BI information from directly within reports using contextual search prompts.
- Fast results: Cognos Go! fully indexes existing BI content and supports the ability to specify search criteria using industry-standard tips and tricks, helping users find the right information quickly.
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
BI Architecture
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence is built with a single, modern Web services architecture. It minimizes the resources required for development, deployment, and maintenance for a lower total cost of ownership. It simplifies your BI environment while serving all of your user needs.
Purpose-built Web services architecture
- Modern, multi-tier architecture built using open, modern Web standards such as XML, SOAP, and WSDL.
- Single API lets programmers customize, expose, or hide any BI capability using a wide variety of programming languages.
- Peer-to-peer, multi-threaded architecture provides a distributed environment with automatic load balancing, no single point of failure, and server independence.
- Component-based, with the flexibility to distribute components geographically, across servers, firewalls, etc. according to the needs of the business.
- Scalable to hundreds of thousands of users to support a globally distributed organization.
- Reports, dashboards, analysis, scorecards, and business event management rules are written once and deployed globally to reduce reporting backlog.
Web-based development and deployment
- Common zero-footprint, browser-based environment requires no desktop installs, plug-ins, or applets.
- Point-and-click, task-based interface improves user adoption, increases user self-service, and reduces user dependence on IT.
- Administration can be centralized or distributed closer to the point of impact.
- Enables remote access to the system; log on from anywhere for remote Web-based administration and report authoring.
- Single point of update; deploy changes to all users simultaneously.
Integrates with your existing infrastructure
- Leverages your existing IT assets and infrastructure, including security systems, RDBMS, application servers, Web applications, networks, and metadata.
- Integrates easily with Web portals such as IBM WebSphere, SAP Enterprise Portal, Plumtree, and WSRP-compliant portals.
- Supports Windows, Unix, and Linux operating systems in uniform and mixed platform deployments.
- Supports numerous standards and data sources without coding or data migration.
- Supports complex mixed application environments.
Supports BI standardization
- Cognos 8 BI delivers all the capabilities users require in one product, on one architecture. As a standardized BI environment it reduces complexity, provides greater business agility, and lowers your TCO.
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
Business Event Management
Cognos 8 BI business event management tracks significant events that need attention. It monitors these events and uses decision-process and business-process automation to compress the time to action and resolution.
A look at Cognos 8 BI business event management
Definition of events and tasks
- Using event conditions and agents, specify the events to be monitored and the tasks to manage them.
- Manage events in context to ensure appropriate responses are carried out at each stage of the event lifecycle—new, ongoing, or resolved.
Decision-based issue resolution
- Users are notified of events via email alerts or through dynamic Web portal headlines.
- Provide contextual event information by embedding or linking reports, metrics, and event history.
- Through multiple-alert messaging, ensure that a single event results in different messages being generated for all affected issue owners.
Business-process issue resolution
- Initiate an automated response when human intervention is not required.
- Business processes include initiating a Web Service application or stored procedure.
Event lifecycle tracking
- Automated reports show all ongoing events and their status for easy tracking.
Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
Data Integration
Data integration is a key component within Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, a single product that provides complete BI capabilities on a proven architecture.
Cognos data integration is an enterprise-wide ETL solution designed for high performance business intelligence. It optimizes data merging, extraction, transformation, and dimensional management to deliver data warehouses ready for business reporting and analysis.
A look at Cognos 8 BI Data Integration.
- Patented automated dimensional management.
- Multi-platform, server-based engine processes large volumes of data in short update windows with minimal hardware investment.
- Working within existing data architectures, the powerful pipelined transformation engine reads the data in a single pass, delivering high throughput.
- Delivers key metadata to the Cognos 8 BI metadata environment.
- Provides read access to all modeled data in the Cognos 8 metadata environment.
Unique dimensional framework
- Delivers data warehouses that consist of coordinated data marts to provide conformed dimensions and facts that are shared across subject areas.
- Delivers a consistent, accurate, and reusable data foundation by conforming key dimensions such as time, product, and customer to enable reporting and analysis across business areas.
- Flexible dimensional framework adapts to business changes and can scale up to an enterprise solution.
- Automated dimensional management capabilities:
o Surrogate key management for dimensions and facts.
o Delivery of conformed dimensions and facts.
o Support for slowly changing dimensions.
o Late arriving facts and dimensions.
o Hierarchy definitions and validation.
Integration with Cognos Planning
- Integrates Cognos Planning data for write back to your data warehouse.
- Extends BI capabilities to include planning data with your actuals.
Administration
- Integrates with source control systems, promotes or shares components from environment to environment, and performs component impact analysis.
- From any client machine, process builds on any server located in the network using Web services.
- For any build, see in a graphical environment how it has performed over time by reviewing log files and analyzing statistics or view any current process as it executes.
Easy to use
- Intuitive graphical environment enables:
o Rapid development and deployment.
o Merging of heterogeneous data sources.
o Drag and drop capabilities.
o Easy management of projects.
o Data profiling and quality checking.
- Iterative development environment results in short implementation cycles.
- Multi-developer support.
- Interactive wizards help you to quickly develop builds.
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Cognos 8 Business Intelligence is a simple and complete BI product, built on a proven architecture by the proven innovator in BI.
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