Cascading Filters in Cognos 11.2.3 Dashboards

Cognos version 11.2.3 brings several new features, but one of the most requested is the ability to have cascaded filters in Dashboards. The functionality is similar to the way you used cascading prompts in Reports, which have been around forever. When Dashboards came out, the filtering options were pretty limited. This addition sets the filtering up to be more interactive. Let's take a closer look.

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IBM Planning Analytics with Watson (PA) vs Anaplan vs Workday Adaptive Planning

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, when it comes to planning for your organization’s success in an unpredictable world that is data-driven, chances are that you have outgrown Excel spreadsheets and are looking for an extended planning and analysis (xP&A) software solution such as IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, Anaplan or Workday Adaptive Planning. Let’s have a closer look at some of the key features in IBM Planning Analytics with Watson, Anaplan, and Workday Adaptive Planning.

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Amazon QuickSight Complete Guide #3: QuickSight Q

This is a continuation of the QuickSight series of posts, focusing on AWS QuickSight’s new feature, Q. Q is a machine learning powered querying capability in QuickSight that allows business users to query using their everyday natural language. Q is a way for organizations to break from the traditional BI mold. Previously, organizations needed a BI analyst or engineer to build out their dashboards.

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Cognos Cloud vs On-Premise

With all the talk about cloud computing these days, does it really make sense to move your Cognos Analytics instance to the cloud? What functionality and benefits are gained or lost when doing so? What about when starting from scratch? What is the best option for your Cognos Analytics (CA) environment? There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes down to it. We’ll discuss the differences which, hopefully, will help you make an informed decision.

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Getting 3.5 Hours Back Every Day with RPA

The average policy renewal time at New Mexico Mutual used to be 20 minutes. With RPA, it’s five minutes. A subprocess like policy assignment that used to require a minute of someone’s time is now completed in ten seconds or less by the RPA bot. Across a full workday at New Mexico Mutual, these improvements give three and a half hours back to staff. Moving forward, New Mexico Mutual isn’t limiting RPA to policy renewals. “We have also built two additional RPA bots for our claims department and one to assist in business analytics,” says De Bruijn. And the rest of the business has noticed. “In 2022 we’ve already gotten a lot of requests from our business teams. So we are going to continue that growth and automation.”

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Cognos Server Maintenance Guide

Routine Cognos server maintenance is critical in order to ensure your environment performs optimally and remains reliable. Failure to attend to this could likely cause unnecessary downtime and impact critical deadlines. Similar to maintaining a vintage car – all it requires is some shrewd TLC. In this article, I review some key checks to assist in maintaining your Cognos Analytics servers.

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The Official Cloud Migration Checklist

Most businesses are migrated or are in the process of migrating, critical workloads to cloud infrastructure. The competitive advantage cloud platforms give businesses makes this move an easy choice for organizations. Employees on the front lines tasked with managing these workloads know making the choice to move to the cloud is easier than performing the actual migration. Fortunately, PMsquare is here to help! I’ve created a high-level checklist to keep in mind when beginning your cloud migration. This list will help frame your thinking when planning to move on-premises applications to a cloud provider like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

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Conditional Formatting in Cognos Analytics (Advanced & Basic)

Once you have started honing your report authoring skills in Cognos Analytics, you may want to take the next step in your authoring… and customizing the output using Conditional Formatting is one of the ways you can do this. As implied by its name, Conditional Formatting allows the user to apply formatting only when a certain condition is met.

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Calculating On-Premise vs Cloud Costs

Many organizations struggle to figure out whether migrating to the cloud is the right financial decision. There are many questions that must be answered prior to making a final call. For example, what financial factors should be taken into consideration when deciding if your company should migrate to the cloud? How can you calculate the cost of running your operations in the cloud? What are the hidden costs associated with a cloud environment? How much will you be spending or saving every month by running your operations in the cloud instead of on-premise? The first step to answering any of the questions is to examine all costs associated with the current infrastructure.

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How Does Incorta Work?

Incorta is a direct data platform that delivers an end-to-end self-service data experience. Incorta consolidates data management and analytics into a single integrated platform for data acquisition, storage, analysis, visualization, and reporting without the cost and complexity of traditional solutions.

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Kai Ming’s PMsquare Children’s Center Opens Its Doors

Kai Ming, a non-profit agency providing comprehensive early care and education services for underprivileged children, and PMsquare, a data analytics technology and consulting firm, are excited to announce that the PMsquare Children’s Center has officially opened its doors on May 13th in Mission Bay, San Francisco.

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Reduce Cognos Install Times with AWS EC2 User Data and AMIs

Installing Cognos takes time. The more complex the environment, the more time it takes. The time spent running the Cognos installer is compounded by the number of environments that need to be created. Fortunately, there are options on AWS to help Cognos administrators get out of the business of waiting for the install to complete. The two options we will be exploring here are EC2 user data and custom AMIs.

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New Cube Viewer & Set Editor in Planning Analytics (2022)

IBM’s latest releases include a “new experience” cube viewer (or exploration) and a newly configured Set editor. There are several improvements and enhancements to the new viewer and set editor that represents IBM’s direction in making features easier to access. IBM is focused on improvements to the “new experience” within Workspace as it plans to deprecate the “classic experience”.

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Which To Choose: Staff Aug or SaaS Anywhere?

Just the other day, I was wrangling with a DIY challenge and spent hours trying to make a scattering of suboptimal tools I had work when a short run to the hardware store would have solved all my problems in minutes. In much the same way in analytics consulting, I see my clients sometimes struggling to find the right service for their challenges of the near and long term. In this piece, I’ll share an overview of two seemingly similar service options and discern the right time to engage for each.

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Cloud-Enable Your Legacy Applications

Many organizations have begun shifting their operations to virtual data centers, modernizing their applications to be cloud-enabled. But what exactly is “cloud-enabled,” and how can they adopt a new cloud architecture? Let’s dive into the meaning of the term and look at some examples to give a better understanding of how these applications can fit into a cloud deployment.

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