What Makes User Adoption Thrive?

If you want to use Cognos to its maximum potential, knowing how Cognos is being used within your user community is vitally important.  You need to know who’s using it, how often, and what content is utilized most often. This engagement is called “user adoption” and the extent to which your users actively and effectively engage with the tool has a significant impact on the overall success and ROI of a solution.   So how do you make user adoption thrive in Cognos?

The Myth of User Adoption

There’s an old misconception about user adoption that, “If you build it, they will come.” Unfortunately, this notion is often not the case.  A lot more is required to make sure your users are comfortable using Cognos. A more accurate saying might be, “If you built it, and train your users, and your users feel enabled, and your data is trusted, and the environment runs fast, and it’s flashy, and problems are fixed quickly… they might come.

Under-utilization and lack of Cognos user adoption often stem from an inability to monitor your system and your users.  Without the ability to effectively assess utilization, organizations can struggle to provide accurate support.  Making user adoption thrive is critical.

Start Thriving!

To address Cognos user adoption challenges, PMsquare has developed Thrive – a custom solution that allows you to see the bigger picture of what is happening in your Cognos system.  Thrive provides detailed visibility via an easy-to-use suite of dashboards and reports that keeps track of user, report, and package activity.  You can also track chronic problems that users frequently run into, such as report failures and replicate effective elements of user adoption.

Thrive has four main areas that help you explore and manage your Cognos environment, with more features being added to every release.  As you look at these features one thing to keep in mind is that items are interactive and can drilled down for more detail. If you see a user and want more information (such as if they’ve been running into errors or which reports they’ve been executing) just click to view user details.

Run Overview

Run Overview displays the top 10 Packages, Reports, and Users for the last 30 days and over the course of the past 12 months.  This gives you recent a recent snapshot you can analyze against a larger trend.

The rightmost column shows the top 10 failures within the last 30 days. You can see which reports and users are experiencing the most difficulty.

Here you can click on any User, Report or Package to view a detail window of specific information such as Run Count, Last Run Date, Failure Percentage, and more.

View Overview

View Overview allows you to see how users in your organization who only view reports that others have run are using your environment. These features are the same as in the Run Overview. Some organizations view saved content more often than they run their own, which is why it can be an important metric to keep track of.

User Adoption Dashboard

The User Adoption Dashboard lets you keep track of your users, and see who’s using the system from the most active users down to the least active. Monitoring user activity is very critical for increasing adoption.  If a user is running into errors they will stop using the system, and if they drop out of the system you need to know that so you can provide the support they need and get them reengaged.

The last login feature keeps track of when users log in. With a click of a button you can customize your filter parameters, letting you view only the information you want to see.

The Activity Trend shows you the month-to-month trend of each individual user. THRIVE enables you to quickly see all the Analytics Rock stars in your organization! 

User Report Search

Have you ever wanted to see exactly what reports a user has been running, or what errors they’ve been getting again and again? The User Report Search allows you to do exactly that.

The User Report Search enables you to search through a user’s entire run history. You can search for all of their report runs in a given month. You can see what they’ve been running in a given package. You can even filter down to view only the errors they’ve been getting. With the User Report Search, you can see exactly how each user has been interacting in your environment.

 Note: Thrive is under active development and is consistently adding new features. We are currently determining the future direction of Thrive to make it as useful to customers as possible. If you have feedback or feature suggestions that would be helpful for your organization, please contact us!

Conclusion

With Thrive you can see the bigger picture of what’s happening in your Cognos system, allowing you to monitor user activity, identify problems and provide specific support as needed.  These factors promote increased user adoption, which will translate to better business decisions within your organization.

Next Steps

We put a lot of emphasis on user adoption and have multiple resources available including articles, and User Adoption workshops.  Additionally we work with organizations establish internal Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC) and Analytics Centers of Excellence (ACE).  You can discover more about Thrive on our website and read more about effective user adoption in our blog. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for data and analytics news, updates, and insights delivered directly to your inbox.

If you have any questions or would like PMsquare to provide guidance and support for your analytics solution, contact us today.