What is Cognos Analytics?
Turn data into insights
IBM Cognos Analytics is software for taking raw data and turning it into useful insights. These insights are then used to guide operational, tactical, and strategic decision making. This leads to better decisions and improves company performance and profitability!
The actual medium used to communicate these insights depends on a number of factors. For instance: the intended audience, the type of source data, and how the information will be put to use in the business. Here are some of the “insight artifacts” that can be generated in Cognos and used to distribute insights:
Report
Dashboard
Story
Self-service data model
AI-augmented data-discovery model
The tools that make up Cognos Analytics are almost entirely web-based. (There are a couple of admin pieces that aren’t run in a web browser, but the vast majority of users can use it entirely as a web app.)
Data Sources
The data used in Cognos to build analytics content can come from all kinds of places. For instance: relational databases (of all kinds), big data sources such as Hadoop, cubes, spreadsheets, flat files, and more. A single report or dashboard could combine data from various data sources in order to answer complex questions that can’t be addressed with just one set of data. There is also an extremely useful feature in Cognos called “Data Sets”. Data Sets allows a user to extract the data from various sources and store it on the Cognos server. The data set can then be used to simplify the creation of analytics content and deliver very fast performance to end users.
Cognos vs the competition
There are many tools in the market that serve a similar purpose to Cognos Analytics. Some popular ones include Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, and Qlik. This category of software was in the past were often referred to as “Business Intelligence” or “BI”. (Cognos Analytics used to be called “Cognos BI”.) These days the terminology “Business Analytics” or just “Analytics” is more frequently used. (Though some would argue that “Analytics” by definition includes more statistical, forward-looking, predictive elements than “BI”.)
Cognos’ core value proposition, when compared to competitors, is its ability to support managed, governed enterprise analytics artifacts such as “production” reports and dashboards (Mode 1), alongside departmental self-service and data exploration (Mode 2). No other tool on the market thoroughly addresses these two (sometimes competing) priorities. For this reason, Cognos is what is known as a “Bimodal” analytics tool.
Mode 1 Analytics
More 1 Analytics is traditional enterprise reporting. This content is generally developed by IT and is based on a foundation of trusted, governed, quality data. This sort of data delivery mechanism has been around for decades and so it has received less attention in recent years. Nevertheless, these sorts of reports are ubiquitous in businesses of all types and are invaluable delivery mechanisms for data that drive decision making. Mode 1 analytics has the following limitations/challenges:
Limited flexibility (users can change prompt values, but usually have limited ability to truly explore data and create their own analyses)
Processes that ensure data quality can be very time consuming.
Request routing through IT can sometimes result in a bottleneck that can be a barrier to data being available when needed.
Mode 2 Analytics
As a response to the issues with Mode 1 Analytics, Mode 2 tools rose to prominence. Mode 2 allows for business-driven data analysis and discovery. With the ability to easily ingest data from spreadsheets and other sorts of files on the user’s desktop and quickly create elegant visualizations of the data, these tools gained a strong presence in many departments and teams in various types of organizations. While Mode 1 tools were procured through IT departments often with the intent for use organization-wide, Mode 2 tools (such as Tableau) could be easily downloaded from the internet by anyone and quickly put to use without the need to involved IT. Despite the attractiveness of this option, Mode 2 analytics has the following issues:
Data is not centrally managed and governed, therefore different users may be using different versions of the data or calculating key metrics in different ways. There is no “single version of the truth”.
Because of the ease of creating attractive dashboards and data visualizations combined with a lack of data governance, it is possible (and studies have shown likely and costly), that analytics will be created and put to use that shows incorrect data.
Users eventually need support from IT if a tool gains traction in their team or department, and so IT can end up with a very challenging support situation—especially when multiple Mode 2 analytics tools are put to use in various areas of the organization.
Cognos is Bimodal
The IBM Cognos platform delivers a bimodal toolset that allows organizations to take advantage of the positive aspects of both modes of analytics. It also helps mitigate the downsides of each. While self-service will always be inherently less managed and governed than traditional enterprise reporting, with Cognos it is possible to roll out a hybrid model. In a hybrid model, base data assets are validated and governed, and from those base assets users can create their own analytics content. They can also share with their teams. Furthermore, IT has visibility into what users are doing, so they can provide training and other enablement to users to help ensure that self-service content is valid and useful.
Tools and functions
Cognos can do many things analytics-related. Here is a rundown of the key tools and functions provided by the platform:
Reporting
Reporting (previously “Report Studio” or “Authoring”) is a powerful (and somewhat complex) tool for creating more or less any sort of data analysis that can be imagined. Through the core functionality of the tool a report developer has can create all sorts of views of data—tables of data formatted in a myriad of ways or all sorts of visual representations of data (such as charts and graphs). Developers can utilize various functions to join multiple datasets together and display the results of complex calculations. Furthermore, a skilled developer can go even beyond the functionality built directly into Cognos to leverage a broader web development toolbox (such as HTML, CSS, and javascript) on top of the core Cognos data engine to deliver “pixel perfect” output to meet all sorts of user requirements.
In spite of the power available in Reporting, there is a more user-friendly layer included that does not require coding at all.
Dashboards
Dashboards are an intuitive tool for quickly generating elegant and highly interactive visualizations of data. It can be learned quickly by almost anyone, without a need to understand underlying technical concepts about querying data. It even has AI baked in to help suggest the types of visualizations that are best suited for the data being analyzed. While Dashboards doesn’t have the myriad of customization possibilities that Reporting does, it provides an excellent balance of flexibility and ease of use. It’s targeted at a business user audience that may or may not have any sort of technical background, but have an understanding of their data and is looking to data to help them answer business questions.
Stories
Stories are closely related to Dashboards—it’s a way to take Dashboard content and present it in a sort of narrative form. The easiest way for most people to think about it is a sort of “PowerPoint presentation” of live analytics content. Just like PowerPoint, this content could be clicked through and shown as part of a presentation, or can be set to automatically loop and put on display. For instance, a sales department could have a monitor showing live progress toward sales goals.
Data Modules
The reality behind any great dashboard or report is that there was almost assuredly some substantial data preparation that had to take place before it could be created. Data Modules is a powerful but intuitive tool for taking raw data and making sense of it so that it’s ready to feed a dashboard, story, scorecard, or report. Data Modules has a thoughtfully designed interface that makes it accessible to business “power users” for self-service, but also can be leveraged by dedicated IT data modelers to tackle complex data scenarios.
Explorations
Reports and Dashboards are great tools for answering questions. How do our sales this year compare to last year? How are our expenses trending year to date? But what about the questions that no one has thought to ask? Explorations is a user-friendly application of Artificial Intelligence and statistics behind the scenes that allow for a user to simply explore a set of data. The Cognos AI engine will highlight potentially relevant relationships in the data from an unbiased standpoint, and allow the user to dive in and understand those relationships more deeply. Find something interesting? It’s easy to take the data exploration findings and turn them into a dashboard or story.
AI Assistant
The AI assistant provides the ability to query data by asking questions in a conversational manner. Rather than dragging in “fields”, a user can ask a question in natural language like, “what is revenue year to date” and let the Cognos AI engine generate a visualization that answers the question. In fact, a user can even say, “create dashboard”, and the system will automatically generate a dashboard starting point based on the data set in context! Is it likely to be exactly what the user is looking for? No, but it’s a great shortcut to get things going rather than starting with a blank canvas.
Event Studio
Event studio is used to monitor conditions in your data, and trigger action when the conditions specified are met. For instance, rather than sending out a report on a daily basis that mostly contains routine (uninteresting) data, why not only send a report when there is some sort of unexpected circumstance that would require action? This lessens the burden on a human to examine reports and find exceptions, eliminating information overload and instead surfacing relevant insights that can result in a more efficient and profitable business.
What kind of businesses use Cognos?
Since Cognos addresses a problem that almost all businesses face (the need to turn data into meaningful information), it can be used in all sorts of organizations of all different sizes. Sometimes tools designed for a specific industry will include some basic level of analytics within their applications (usually a set of pre-built reports). Cognos Analytics is often brought in when that limited reporting proves insufficient or when data from multiple systems needs to be brought together to answer critical business questions.
Some have tried to create industry-specific “templates” as a starting point for implementing Cognos Analytics. However, in our experience working with all sorts of companies (many of which have had industry overlap), every business has such a unique combination of systems, processes, and people that there is little to be gained by trying to apply a template. Instead, when we help clients implement Cognos Analytics, we consider them to be the experts in their own business, and we provide the necessary expertise about analytics and the Cognos platform.
The latest features
Want more details on the newest features in Cognos and see it in action firsthand? Join our webinar on June 7th as we cover the release of Cognos 12.0.0.
Let us help you maximize Cognos Analytics!
Contact us today, and we’ll connect you with a friendly and experienced consultant who work with you to ensure you get the most out of IBM Cognos Analytics! Or, if it’s during our business hours then use the chat option in the bottom right to chat right now with an analytics pro in the PMsquare offices.