A SIMPLE, POWERFUL, AND PRACTICAL
ANALYTICS SOLUTION FOR A NEW
GENERATION OF USERS
IBM COGNOS ANALYTICS
Jorge García
TEC Senior BI and Data Management Analyst
February 2016
www.technologyevaluation.com
TEC SPOTLIGHT REPORT TEC Spotlight Reports give you an in-depth look at
leading vendors’ products, initiatives, and market
position from an analyst’s point of view.
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IBM Cognos Analytics—Simple, Powerful, and Practical for a
New Generation of Users
This TEC Spotlight Report offers readers an in-depth look at the capabilities and
features of the new IBM Cognos offering, IBM Cognos Analytics, as well as an
analyst perspective of this new solution from IBM.
The report contains the following elements:
1. An overview of the new capabilities of IBM Cognos Analytics highlighting
new features within the general data cycle for business intelligence (BI)
and analytics, such as data collection and modeling, among others.
2. Main benefits and challenges for organizations to overcome in order to
fully exploit the data visualization capabilities provided by IBM Cognos
Analytics.
Note: For this product analysis and evaluation, the IBM Business Analytics team
conducted a product demonstration for Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) and
provided the requested information for the analysis.
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Executive Summary The business intelligence (BI) and analytics market landscape and associated
business practices have changed dramatically over the past five years. New
requirements from corporate entities and lines of business have called for simple
yet powerful systems, leading both software providers and practitioners to adopt
simpler yet robust approaches to address these emerging needs.
Freedom to analyze information while maintaining good data governance
practices have obliged organizations to take radical measures for developing
analytics processes that are simple to perform yet powerful for deriving
valuable insight.
With its long-standing experience in the BI market, IBM is responding to these
market needs with a refreshingly new approach. The software giant is availing its
core analytics power with the practicality, agility, and conciseness needed to offer
authors of analytics content and consumers of analytics services a robust solution
that aims to solve their complex problems with a modern, practical, easy, and
self-service approach.
This report reviews the main features of IBM Cognos Analytics for achieving two
main goals:
1. Addressing the new challenges for generating fast, accurate, and agile
analytics solutions.
2. Providing effective analytics tools to a new generation of business
analysts, BI specialists, decision makers, and data scientists.
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About IBM Cognos Analytics Over the past several years, IBM has put much effort into elevating IBM Cognos,
one of the most recognized brands in BI space, to the next level of functionality.
The vendor has made dramatic improvements to the analytics portfolio of IBM
Cognos with respect to ease of use, analytical power, efficiency, and adaptability
to new conditions, among other features.
In this context, IBM has released Cognos Analytics, the official heir to the famous
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence platform. The new offering entails much more
than a name change. IBM Cognos Analytics aims to drastically change the way
users interact with the system, while taking advantage of the enhanced analytical
power of Cognos.
With Cognos Analytics, IBM offers a modern and effective application for analytics
to both its existing customer base and a new breed of users that are more data
savvy, driven, and have a taste for practical yet effective data analysis tools.
Let’s take a look at some of the new and outstanding features, functions, and
properties of the new analytics offering from IBM.
IBM Cognos Analytics: A Functional Review During the IBM Cognos Analytics product demonstration session, and research
and conversations conducted in preparation of this report, three key ideas stood
out in regard to the new direction the Cognos team has taken with IBM Cognos
Analytics:
BI is an indispensable factor for running the business
A pent-up demand exists for agile analytics
Data silos can compromise the maturity and performance of analytics
These three factors drive the evolution of analytics and BI solutions. They serve as
an impetus for developing and offering software solutions that enable
organizations to balance their business departments’ need for conducting various
types of analyses on all sources of data and the corporate entity’s need for
guaranteeing proper data governance and security.
IBM drew upon its long-standing experience and improved five fundamental
aspects of its former Cognos BI offering to develop the IBM Cognos Analytics
solution (figure 1):
Intelligence. Quickly get the answers you need—providing end-to-end
guidance on the best approach to data analysis and recommendations on
how to best visualize your data.
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Agility. Put analytics services in the hands of an increasing number of
users in more diverse areas while expediting the analytics-development
process—enabling faster and more efficient data analytics capabilities.
Mobility. Offer a solution that can be accessed by a wide range of mobile
devices—releasing the analytics process from the constraints of time and
location.
Trust. Make enhancements in data security, lineage, and quality—
reinforcing confidence in the data and consequently deriving trustworthy
insights for the business.
Connection. Redesign the cycle to connect the analytics process with the
ultimate business users—encouraging collaborative idea generation and
analysis and facilitating decision making.
Figure 1. IBM Cognos Analytics—the new face of analytics (Courtesy of IBM)
According to the IBM Cognos team, these enhancements to the core capabilities
of the new IBM Cognos solution allow businesses to garner significant benefits
and improvements to their analytics cycle. Let’s take a more detailed look at the
specific benefits availed to users of the IBM Cognos Analytics offering:
“Smarter” self-service for analytics
Enhancements to IBM Cognos regard the provision of self-service capabilities,
and an approach to comprehensive data visualization and/or discovery that
encompasses data navigation and interaction for the creation of analytics
resources. Capabilities TEC witnessed in the IBM Cognos Analytics demonstration
session include the following:
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Easy access to data originating from many sources and ability to combine
tables—facilitating the data modeling process. IBM Cognos Analytics
includes a smart search tool with rich contextual properties for
effectively locating data elements such as tables and documents.
Intent-driven and intuitive modeling. There are tools for easy guidance
during the modeling process and for authoring new data analysis (this
includes neat new plus buttons that enable easy access to common
design and authoring tools such as charts, lists, tables, and so on; see
figure 2).
Figure 2. IBM Cognos Analytics—new plus button (Courtesy of IBM)
Exposure of contextual tips and data to guide users—both experienced
and non-experienced—to more rapidly conduct analyses and develop
analytics objects (charts, graphs, dashboards).
A new unified experience via a single web experience specifically
designed for ease of use. The IBM Cognos team has worked hard to
afford users a single and friendly experience across all devices—desktop
and mobile.
Collaboration and content sharing to enable easy communication of data
elements between team members as well as to register activity within
the group in order to facilitate communication and decision making
(figure 3).
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Figure 3. IBM Cognos Analytics—new collaboration interface (Courtesy of IBM)
IBM Cognos Analytics also makes it easy to instantly share findings and
collaborate across teams—enabling the transmission of valuable content across
people and teams.
Another really noteworthy feature enables users to reuse already created content
by allowing users to easily share and reuse their existing data models. This
iterative process has the potential for encouraging continuous improvements to
the analytics process and garnering new insights and intelligence.
IBM Cognos Analytics also reinforces a self-service experience and collaboration
with an easy way to reuse content and modules. The system has a general panel
to expose previously created work. It allows the creator of the original content as
well as other members of a team make to the content readily available for reuse.
Encouraging consumption and creation of analytics content
The new face of IBM Cognos displays a number of features for enabling
consumption and creation of analytics content (reports, dashboards, and others).
On the consumption side, there is not only an improved and cleaner user
interface, which improves the way users navigate through the content that is
available, but also a feature that enables users to easily identify and readily access
the commonly used items.
Additionally, there is a subscription feature that enables users to configure and
receive automatic updates of those reports they want to keep up to date
(figure 4).
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Figure 4. IBM Cognos Analytics—new scheduled report distribution interface (Courtesy of
IBM)
On the content-creation side, the IBM Cognos Analytics product has some new
noteworthy features such as the following:
A complete set of design and layout templates and styles for facilitating
dashboard and report design, along with easy content drag-and-drop
options for inserting content elements such as analytics and graph tools.
Visualization recommendations based on the data make it easy for users
to select the right visualizations for their data set.
On the data modeling side, the product enables automated model
generation and provides features for easily searching for specific fields
and automatically joining multiple data sources (tables) (figure 5).
Figure 5. IBM Cognos Analytics—new data modeling interface (Courtesy of IBM)
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Sharing the “Lite” with administrators A really outstanding set of features availed by IBM Cognos Analytics regards the
new administration capabilities added by IBM to facilitate management of the
solution. These improvements help IBM reinforce the system’s administration in
three main aspects: security, user and content management, and the upgrading
process from Cognos BI 10:
Security
IBM Cognos Analytics enables flexible management and access to user profiles
and curated data as well as easy management of security and authentication
within a same centralized console.
User and content management
IBM Cognos Analytics enables flexible management for users, teams, and
departments. The system grants or denies access based on schedules, content,
and data, reflecting a simple yet flexible and powerful management approach.
The system also includes options for accessing external (and governed) data in
order to comply with general internal data governance initiatives.
Upgrading
IBM has developed a complete strategy for enabling its existing Cognos BI user
base to migrate/upgrade from Cognos BI version 10+ to IBM Cognos Analytics.
Operating by the ‘leave no content behind’ design principle to ensure minimal
disruption, IBM aims to provide easy-to-use tools for minimizing disruption
associated with upgrades to the IBM Cognos Analytics solution.
IBM’s objective is to roll out this totally renewed administration layer to new user
groups with minimal effort and training—and streamline the overall process of
managing simple as well as complex deployment scenarios for IBM Cognos
Analytics.
IBM has also made its Cognos Analytics offering available in the cloud, and offers
hybrid data options to its on-premises version in order to provide flexibility in
deployment.
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Figure 6. IBM Cognos Analytics—new administration interface (Courtesy of IBM)
A Modern Analytics Solution IBM has put significant effort into developing its new analytics offering,
IBM Cognos Analytics. The vendor has made dramatic improvements and added
new features to the product’s predecessor IBM Cognos Business Intelligence for
complying with new standards and guidelines for analytics. The new offering has
simpler and streamlined processes and interfaces, and provides users with
guidance at all stages of the process of analytics content development.
The new interface is clearly easier to use and navigate. The addition of tools for
rapid drag-and-drop design and reuse of legacy content will certainly expedite the
upgrading and content generation process to the IBM Cognos Analytics solution.
What impact will these enhancements and new aspects of the system have
among users with experience with other data discovery and visualization tools?
The new interface offers extensive flexibility and has the potential to increase
system adoption, particularly by users of such types of solutions.
IBM has made conscientious efforts in modernizing its analytics stack with a series
of integral functionality changes that help make IBM Cognos Analytics a robust yet
simple solution that has the power to reshape the business analytics landscape.
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About the Author
Jorge García is a senior business intelligence (BI) and data management analyst for TEC.
He has more than 20 years of experience in all phases of application development,
database and data warehouse (DWH) design, as well as 9 years in project management,
covering best practices and new technologies in the BI/DWH space.
Prior to joining TEC, García was a senior project manager and senior analyst developing
BI, DWH, and data integration applications with Oracle, SAP Business Objects, and data
integration. He has also worked on projects related to the implementation of BI
solutions for the private sector, including the banking and services sectors. He has had
the opportunity to work with some of the most important BI and DWH tools on the
market.
García is a member of the Boulder BI Brain Trust..
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