Incorta’s Direct Data Platform significantly altered customers’ IT teams’ culture, encouraging employees to make more intelligent decisions and to become more curious about their data. End users no longer have to wait weeks or even days for answers, they can gather insights in a matter of minutes with Incorta.
Read MoreSo, you have been granted access to your company’s Cognos Analytics application, and you are eager to create your first report, but not really sure where to start, or how to get to the point that your report is answering the questions you are hoping to answer. Hopefully, this article will help you achieve your desired results, or at least get you a good start towards that goal. Let’s get started!
Read MoreThose who have used the Trifacta platform wouldn’t just tell you that it works—they’d also tell you that we’ve actually made data preparation fun. What was once considered a tedious, often dreaded activity has now become quite addictive with the Trifacta platform. Still, getting started with a new technology isn’t easy. Here are a few tips to get you feeling confident and comfortable with the Trifacta data preparation platform.
Read MoreIf you have an active Scrum practice, make a plan to implement one of these tips. Change doesn’t have to be daunting, nor does it have to be forced in all at once. It never hurts to be agile about Agile. In their book Fixing Your Scrum, Ripley and Miller offer an approach to effectively identifying and applying changes within an organization, by asking the simple question: “What’s within my control that I can change to get our organization 15% closer to where it needs to be?”
Read MoreBusiness Intelligence tools have changed rapidly over the last few years with many vendors pushing out multiple updates each year – some even quarterly. It has become difficult to keep track of the myriad changes to the tools as each release brings them functionally closer to each other. So, we’ve created a matrix to help!
Read MorePMsquare is proud to announce the formation of our new Cloud Data Delivery business unit. Cloud Data Delivery brings together decades of experience solving data pipeline, data warehousing, and business intelligence challenges from across the organization into a single entity focused on delivering cloud-first data solutions and migrating existing on-prem data warehouse and BI workloads to the cloud.
Read MoreHave you ever thought it would be nice to be able to add or update some piece of data and have it reflected in your Cognos Analytics Dashboard and/or Reports? Well, now you can, with the IBM TM1 REST API and some Cognos Analytics Custom Controls! The IBM TM1 REST API allows you to create, read, update, and delete TM1 data, as well as interact with your TM1 Server in other ways (that’s a different article).
Read MoreThe applications and plans feature is a new feature as of the 2.0.58 (October 2020) release of Planning Analytics. It represents a brand-new approach to managing the budgeting process. Applications and plans let you organize logically related Planning Analytics Workspace assets such as books, views, and websheets in containers called assets. How the assets are organized is completely up to the administrator. Books or views can be organized to match your management structure or based on the flow of specific tasks.
Read MoreFew ideologies or concepts have been as transformative in the realm of project delivery over the past couple of decades as Scrum. Now celebrating 25 years in existence and deeply embedded at tech startups and tech giants alike, Scrum has practically become a household name ( – though not quite, as evidenced by recurring questions from my wife: “What exactly are you a master of?” and “What’s a… scrum?”).
Read MoreWe’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.
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