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Cognos Analytics Consulting Team, January 8, 2021
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Table of Contents
Analytics Adoption is Hard and Hard to Monitor
Modern BI tools have become a necessity for any organization to make informed, progressive decisions in today’s ever-changing world. An organization’s ability to collect and make sense of raw data and transform this data into actionable insights for the average business user is what ultimately separates them from the competition. As we know, these tools are powerful, with immense computing power as well as an array of valuable features created to bring life to raw data. All this being said, with these powerful tools employed, no data analytics initiatives should fail? Right? In 2016, Gartner estimated that 60 percent of big data projects failed. A year later, an analyst at Gartner by the name of Nick Heudecker [1] 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.
The lifeblood of any BI tool, especially IBM Cognos, is the users, teams, and communities that utilize them to give their organizations the insights they need when they need them the most. Now, this may sound like common sense, but when you are dealing with an everchanging BI tool like Cognos, the flow of information becomes jumbled, users become overwhelmed, and the rate of user adoption drops from upgrade to upgrade. This is the key reason we believe big data initiatives fail before they even start.
The fact of the matter is simple, user adoption issues and underutilization of Cognos environments often stem from an organization’s inability to monitor their system and users. At PMsquare we realized this early. Promoting and understanding user adoption is critical to the overall success and ROI of any data solution including Cognos.
My colleague Ryan Dolley once said something about user adoption that stuck with me. He said “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.”
If we know that 60% of all data initiatives fail, and most of those are because of User Adoption, what can we do to better understand our user communities? How often they use the BI tools? What content do they utilize? To answer these tough questions and ensure a heightened sense of user adoption, we developed Thrive.
Amplify Your Analytics
Thrive is a powerful cloud application built to drive user adoption and help any organization with a Cognos footprint better maximize their ROI and analytics spend, and confidently answer the age-old question of “are my analytics initiatives really working?”
Thrive was created so our clients could better understand their user community, what features they value, and most importantly, where they struggle. Cognos Admins and BI Team Leads can use Thrive to get an unfiltered view into their user base, allowing them visibility into exactly who is utilizing Cognos and more importantly, who isn’t. With this knowledge, you can rest assured that you know what users are running into errors the most frequently and which are abandoning the tool. This gives leadership the ability to proactively remediate userbase problems before they lead to a drop in user adoption. This is the first step to not only increase the rate of user adoption but maintain it long term.
Thrive doesn’t really determine ROI. It really maximizes your ROI. So maybe “maximize”?
Although Thrive started as a tool to help organizations control user adoption, through a combination of innovation by our product team and client feedback, Thrive has turned into this multifaceted tool that is helping organizations solve problems that they didn’t even know they had in the first place, for example, implementing near real-time issue notifications. Currently, if a problem arises within a Cognos environment, an immediate resolution isn’t necessarily an option. The issue will only be brought to light when a report fails upon execution, from there, the Cognos Developer will notify their team lead who will attempt to proactively take measures to remediate the problem, but by that point, the damage has already been done. With Thrive’s issue tracker, you can classify what you want to be alerted about within your environment. Whether it be a failed/timed out report, or even a user not logging into Cognos for consecutive days, you will receive a near real-time notification making you the first to know, every time.
Thrive is the first audit tool that allows you to truly Amplify your Analytics, giving you full visibility into every aspect of your Cognos environment and user base, allowing you to proactively combat user adoption issues and identify problem areas BEFORE your data initiatives begin to fail. Giving you the peace of mind that your BI environment is running to its peak potential, without the need for constant maintenance.
Thrive as a solution has solved problems that our clients did not even know they had. Are you ready to truly Amplify your Analytics?
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!
Wrap-Up
User adoption is something we take very seriously, we have multiple resources, including articles, workshops, and livestreams dedicated to the topic. Additionally, we work with organizations to establish internal Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC) and Analytics Centers of Excellence (ACE). You can discover more about Thrive on our website.
Next Steps
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If you have any questions or would like PMsquare to provide guidance and support for your analytics solution, contact us today.
References and Notes
- Matt Asay, 2017, “85% of big data projects fail,” TechRepublic, November (https://www.techrepublic.com/article/85-of-big-data-projects-fail-but-your-developers-can-help-yours-succeed/).
