We’re pleased as punch to announce a brand new release of the CogBox from the mind of Cognos Paul. CogBox is the world’s premier Cognos productivity and customization extension designed to make your life easier. It includes productivity and usability enhancements as well as a library of custom controls and visualizations. Let’s dive into what you can expect in this release!
Read MoreThe Progress DataDirect Autonomous REST connector included with Cognos Analytics 11.1.7 cannot yet autonomously handle the unconventional JSON that the US Census Bureau sends it. We were hoping that Progress would be able to include the enhancement with Cognos Analytics Fix Pack 2 (released just a few weeks ago), but that’s not the case. In the meantime, here are some manual workaround options to enable use of US Census Bureau data in your Cognos Analytics environments.
Read MoreWith the rollout of Planning Analytics Workspace Local 2.0.57 (and 2.0.58 in Cloud), IBM released long-anticipated Predictive Forecasting capabilities. This allows users to generate forecast data based on historical actuals within the cube. Sophisticated statistical algorithms calculate behind the scenes to provide accurate time series projections which blend trends and seasonality.
Read MoreThe vision was to combine our global organizational reach (offices in: US, Germany, Australia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, India) with our proven methodology to create a repeatable and scalable support arm for our customers’ unique needs. Over the course of the last 3 years, we have implemented and hardened processes to seamlessly coordinate across our global team and deliver value to our customers. Over that time, we have expanded our supported technologies significantly as well, to the point where we now can support many front-end BI tools, major cloud providers, and data pipeline applications.
Read MoreThe 2020 US elections. Emergency responses to the ever-expanding hurricane and wildfire seasons. The COVID-19 pandemic. What do these newsworthy and oft-visualized subject areas all have in common? Integrated US Census Bureau data. The demographic, economic, housing, and social data collected from Census Bureau surveys and programs are often intertwined with other data to provide context. Knowing how to integrate this public data with your own is a skill worth honing.
Read MoreEverything is great. Business analysts are happy, operations is happy, management is happy. Everyone loves the data warehouse. Kudos! And then the data warehouse becomes a victim of its own success. Can we have some more? More data, more data sources, more queries, more reports, more dashboards, more-more-more. But with the same hardware, same staff, same budget, same service-level agreements. Pop quiz, hotshot -- what do you do?
Read MoreIn 2016, Gartner estimated that 60 percent of big data projects failed. A year later, an analyst at Gartner by the name of Nick Heudecker came out and said that the company’s estimate was “too conservative” and estimated the actual failure rate is closer to 85%. Today, nothing has changed. Truly an astounding stat, but the core question remains, why do more than half of these initiatives fail? This question can be answered with two simple words; User Adoption.
Read MoreOne of the great features of the Bag o' Tricks section of CogBox is a control creator. This can be used to create template report objects, like custom controls. What's awesome about this, is that not only does this offer a place for PMsquare's controls, you can also use it to host your own.
Read MoreTransitioning your company from traditional, on-prem architecture to a cloud native architecture can be a technically consuming project. Along with the technical shift in the way you think about your architecture, you also have to reposition your thinking around pricing and provisioning. Leveraging infrastructure as a service (IaaS) means you no longer need to buy a physical box and wait for it to be installed. You are now able to provision a new instance (sever) as easily as renting a movie from Apple TV or signing up for a Spotify subscription.
Read MoreThis is a good life tip in general. There is something incredible about what it can do when you give your time and energy to something outside of yourself. For the purpose of this tip, I want to break this into three types of volunteering: within your job, outside your job but with benefits, and outside your job without benefits.
Read MoreIn prior versions of Cognos (Version 7, ReportNet and Cognos 10) there were tools for quickly slicing and dicing a PowerCube. These tools are no longer part of the Cognos toolset in version 11.1.n so there may be some users missing this capability and would desire it would be still available. While not exactly the same, this functionality persists in the Reporting application portion of Cognos Analytics. This article will help users understand how to use Reporting to replicate the features they miss from PowerPlay and Analysis Studio.
Read MoreIn Planning Analytics, you can get notifications for threads that are in a run state, threads in a wait state, database (instance) shutdowns, and more. I’ll give you an in-depth walkthrough for receiving event notifications from Planning Analytics Administration for Planning Analytics Local.
Read MoreDespite being more of the ‘free-spirit’ type, I’m constantly looking for ways to better manage time. Which is one of the reasons that Incorta stands out as a game-changing alternative to the way in which we approach data warehousing and analytics.
Read MoreIf you are looking to branch out into data science, Cognos can help you! Starting with release 11.1.2, IBM is including Jupyter Notebook Server with Cognos Analytics. Jupyter notebooks are a popular way to analyze data and visualize the results in a browser, but their real power is the ability to share these notebooks with other data scientists who can interact with the data in real-time.
Read MoreWell, it has finally arrived! Planning Analytics Workspace 57 is here, and it is an exciting release. Users will notice a number of functional and cosmetic updates in this release, however, this blog post will focus on the groundbreaking new product enhancements. The main feature and updates that will be discussed are the changes to the ‘Welcome’ and ‘Administration’ pages, ‘Books and Visualizations’ improvements, the brand-new algorithm-based Forecasting feature, as well as Applications and Plans workflow feature.
Read MoreBack in October of 2019, we introduced Incorta to our customers as an emerging technology to not only modernize our customer’s data and analytics estates but also to analyze their most complex data, quickly. Whether you are using Incorta for a pure speed solution or exposing Incorta modeling via Cognos to take advantage of existing enterprise reporting infrastructure, you can take advantage of Incorta and Cognos modeling tools to deliver the best result.
Read MoreAs a consultant, I usually scan it quickly for relevant information and then send it to my favorite Outlook folder - Deleted Items. But what if you’re in charge of a BI environment at a company? Should you be concerned about these security vulnerabilities? And if you’re new to the game how do you even find which bulletins apply to your Cognos version or environment? Maybe you didn’t even know there were security bulletins! I’ll try to break it down.
Read More“It will be easy,” “This BI tool will meet all the needs of your user base,” “They’re going to love it.” Promises about positive end-user experience, such as these, are very common to hear from vendors in the pre-sales stage of an enterprise analytics software sale. However, when the rubber meets the road, many implementations fall short of that expectation or, worse yet, fail.
Read MoreWhile previously it's been possible to bring weather data into Cognos Analytics with some coding via a set of APIs, in Cognos Analytics 11.1.4 The Weather Company was added as a data source, making the process simpler and native to Cognos. Let’s explore how that connection works and look at a simple example of how to visualize Weather company data.
Read MoreThe technology that eventually became TM1 was first developed in 1983 and, after a few acquisitions through the decades, it was purchased by its current owner, IBM, in 2009. Around 2014-2015, IBM began developing a major overhaul to the application in order to keep up with changing trends in the way we use technology and the changing landscape of business analytics.
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