Query and Reporting
Cognos query and reporting capabilities ensure users are equipped with the information they need to make fact-based decisions in a system that?s simpler, faster and easier to manage. From professional report authors who design one-to-many reports for the enterprise, to business users who need to create their own ad-hoc queries or customize existing reports, Cognos query and reporting capabilities fits the needs of users across the organization.

Analysis
Cognos analysis capabilities allows all users to explore information easily and intuitively to drive better, smarter business decisions. From general business users who can easily view, assemble and analyze the information required to make smarter decisions, to business and financial analysts who need more advanced, predictive or what-if analysis capabilities, Cognos analysis capabilities enable all users across the organization to outperform.

Dashboarding
Cognos dashboard capabilities allow any user to access, interact and personalize content in a way that supports the unique way they make decisions. Secure access to information from all time horizons including Business Intelligence, Real-time Monitoring, SPSS and Cognos TM1 means that users can quickly move from insight to action.

Scorecarding
Cognos scorecarding capabilities enable organizations to capture corporate strategy and communicate that strategy at the operational level. It helps executives and managers provide quantifiable goals and targets and allows them to track performance across business units, operating subsidiaries and geographic regions to quickly identify the areas that need attention.

Real-time Monitoring
Cognos features real-time monitoring capabilities for consumers of actionable business intelligence. It provides an organization?s frontline employees with a rich view of operational KPIs and measures to support up-to the-moment decision making.

Statistics
Cognos statistics capabilities, powered by IBM SPSS Statistics Engine, make it easy to incorporate statistical results with core business reporting, reducing the time it takes to analyze data and prepare business presentations based on that analysis.

Extending BI
Empower users across your organization with the business intelligence (BI) they need to make to make effective, fact-based decisions. Cognos Business Intelligence provides solutions to ensure users have consistent, trusted and relevant BI, when, where and how they need it, with Cognos Mobile, Cognos Active Report, Cognos for Microsoft Office and Cognos Mashup Service.

Collaborative BI
Collaboration capabilities within Cognos Business Intelligence facilitate decision-making for groups and teams. With this solution, users can build stronger relationships and learn from history with a centralized, searchable corporate memory. Cognos Collaboration helps teams maximize their efficiency and ensure the most effective use of resources when making important decisions.

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• Analytics that everyone can use in a BI workspace that sharpens individual skills to answer key business questions
• Collective intelligence with built-in collaboration and social networking to connect people and insights to gain alignment
• Actionable insight everywhere in mobile, real-time and business processes to instantly respond at the point of impact

Business intelligence software from IBM connects people with information when and where they need it from virtually any data source so they can make better decisions, faster. With IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software you can:

• Set targets, see results and understand what drives the numbers.
• Create a common context for decision-making across every department.
• Identify and analyze opportunities and trends.
• Deliver trusted information for a single version of the truth.
• Author and share information the way you want to in reports, dashboards, and scorecards.

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence delivers the complete range of BI capabilities on a single, service-oriented architecture (SOA). It helps you gain more value from your existing investments in data and infrastructure.

• Query and Reporting: Author, use and share any type of report drawing on any data source. Present business intelligence information in a consistent and easy-to-use way.
• Analysis: Analyze and report against online analytical processing (OLAP) and dimensionally aware relational data sources. Spot trends and see your business from a variety of dimensions.
• Scorecarding: Build easy-to-use scorecards to align your teams and tactics with strategy. Communicate business goals company-wide and let people monitor performance against their targets.
• Dashboards: Communicate complex information quickly with a range of easy-to-build dashboards.

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At the heart of the Cognos platform is its long-established and proven Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA). The Cognos platform is built on a true set of peer-to-peer services and is built from the ground up on SOA.

Environment-neutral architecture.

The platform is based on open standards. This, combined with the SOA, means IT can use their existing technology standards and be confident that the environment-neutral platform will meet their future requirements as they evolve.

The standards-based services are interoperable and extensible though modern standard interfaces and protocols, including SOAP, XML and SQL.

Flexible peer-to-peer services.

The Cognos platform easily fits into your hardware deployment strategy, whether it is single server, multi-server, cluster or grid.

• Scale up or out to fit your optimal deployment approach, with peer-to-peer services that can be located anywhere on the network
• Use your existing infrastructure by installing the Cognos platform on UNIX, Microsoft Windows, Linux or any combination of these in the same configuration

Single open API.

A single open API ensures full access to functionality. You can easily embed BI into other applications, such as Microsoft Office, Search, hand held devices or other applications.

Purpose-built services

Every service is built for a different use. For example, there is one service for query and one service for presentation.

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The Cognos platform provides helpful tools so IT can deploy, manage and scale BI systems easily and cost-effectively.

Deploy applications more broadly

The Cognos platform lets you deploy broadly with peer-to-peer services, built-in fault tolerance and predictable linear response.

The Cognos platform has been proven to scale in a linear fashion. With linear scalability, administrators can proactively plan for resources when scaling their BI solutions.

Enhanced system management efficiency

Task-oriented system monitoring

• See a consolidated view of all system activity, from scheduled and interactive reports to servers and dispatchers
• Prevent bottlenecks and reduce the load on the system with greater visibility into hourly schedules and data elements
• Suspend activities as you need to

Proactive system administration

• Spend less time looking for information with detailed system metrics that can be monitored automatically
• Set thresholds that trigger personal alerts, to detect issues early and take action on them

System Management Methodology

Jump start your BI deployment and deliver results more quickly with the Cognos System Management Methodology, which includes:

• White papers containing proven practices for system administration
• Metadata models
• Tools to establish performance thresholds automatically
• Sample administration models and reports

Dynamic Query Analyzer

• Increase efficiency with self-service, visual tool
• Gain greater insight into how the dynamic query was generated
• Maintain and troubleshoot more easily with a visually displayed results flow

Lifecycle Manager

Cognos Lifecycle Manager is a tool used for validating report content between two versions of Cognos software or when introducing a change to your environment. You can use it to validate content:

• In a single environment, such as for a data source update
• In multiple environments, to streamline the upgrade process
• Anytime you need to assess the impact of a change, such as new business requirements

Single sign-on

• The Cognos platform leverages existing enterprise security providers, helping lower administration costs while ensuring a secure environment.
• With single sign on, you can simplify the login process and restrict access to data according to your business requirements.

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The Cognos platform ensures consistent information and query results for your entire organization with a multilingual common business model.

A common business model to ensure consistency

The common business model helps provide a consistent view of the business to the user, and captures all the data users want to access.

• See cross-functional business views that span heterogeneous data sources
• Insulate users from the technical complexity of the underlying data
• Establish a common foundation for information sharing on an enterprise scale

Enhanced data model development

The Cognos platform provides a number of capabilities to the metadata modeler and modeling teams to speed model development and ensure optimal results:

• Cognos Model Design Accelerator: a graphical tool that guides modelers through a simplified modeling process. Novice modelers can easily build powerful models without extensive training while experienced modelers create models faster.
• Cognos Model Advisor provides guidance on model development, and is accessible directly from the tool.
• Multi-participant modeling allows IT to work in teams for model development. Models can be segmented for different developers and then brought back together to create the enterprise model.
• Self-service Package Wizard allows business users to automatically publish packages to model data such as directly accessing SAP BW, external data, SPSS modeling results and many more. This capability increases business satisfaction and shortens the time to access information.

Tools to engage the user community in understanding data

The Cognos platform has a set of capabilities for providing a view of information that the business understands and that engages the business user in the information itself, including:

• Cognos Business Viewpoint: Define, govern and share dimensions, hierarchies and attributes in BI and performance management environments.
• Data lineage: Offer users the unique ability to trace back to the original source of data with a simple right-click.

Get in touch with HAL today for more information.

The Cognos platform can access the complete mix of data sources present in most organizations today, whether they are data warehouses, technology platforms applications, OLAP cubes, legacy data sources or modern data sources.

It provides broad reach, open access to all data sources and an easy modeling environment for building access to all needed information.

Single query service

The Cognos platform accesses data using a single query service that issues both SQL and MDX queries and returns consistent and predictable results to all BI requests made through this service.

• Open access to all data
• Optimize data retrieval while ensuring consistent access
• Add new data sources quickly and easily, with data from the new source becoming immediately available to all Cognos capabilities

In-memory patented technology

The Cognos platform offers enhanced performance for complex heterogeneous data with 64-bit in-memory optimized query generation with pattern intelligence, in-memory calculations and aggregate operations, security-aware 64-bit cache facilities with ‘in-memory’ optimizations hierarchies, members, facts, calculations and prompts.

Flexible data sourcing approaches

Use a variety of sourcing approaches, in any combination, to deliver data in the format and with the frequency required:

• Optimized direct access: Access data directly with a native interface using the single query service described above.
• Federated access: Combine current and/or historic data into a single, easy-to-query view, without physically building a data warehouse or data mart.
• Dimensional ETL: Build dimensional data warehouses using Cognos Data Manager, an ETL tool for high-performance transformations.

Optimize access for faster data delivery

Other key tools included in the platform help optimize data storage for access:

• Cognos Transformer helps you build and deliver OLAP cubes. The architecture ensures the resulting cube can be accessed by any capability with the single query service.
• Cognos Virtual View Manager provides the option to cache data in virtual views to both speed response times for the user and offload hits on the operational sources.

Expand traditional BI

The Cognos platform expands traditional BI capabilities with real time monitoring and what-if scenario analysis. With real-time monitoring, you can view up-to-the-second relevant information in-context with all other BI information. What-if scenario analysis allows you to model and compare scenarios as well as validate planning assumptions.

Contact HAL for more information.

Satisfy all your business intelligence needs such as reports, dashboards, scorecards, analysis and planning with a platform that reduces the complexity of your BI environment, increases your return on investment and ultimately lowers your total cost.

Reach all information reliably and timely
The Cognos platform can access the complete mix of data sources present in most organizations today, whether they are data warehouses, technology platforms applications, OLAP cubes, legacy data sources or modern data sources.

It provides broad reach, open access to all data sources and an easy modeling environment for building access to all needed information.

Single query service
The Cognos platform accesses data using a single query service that issues both SQL and MDX queries and returns consistent and predictable results to all BI requests made through this service.

• Open access to all data
• Optimize data retrieval while ensuring consistent access
• Add new data sources quickly and easily, with data from the new source becoming immediately available to all Cognos capabilities

In-memory patented technology
The Cognos platform offers enhanced performance for complex heterogeneous data with 64-bit in-memory optimized query generation with pattern intelligence, in-memory calculations and aggregate operations, security-aware 64-bit cache facilities with ‘in-memory’ optimizations ? hierarchies, members, facts, calculations and prompts.

Flexible data sourcing approaches
Use a variety of sourcing approaches, in any combination, to deliver data in the format and with the frequency required:

• Optimized direct access: Access data directly with a native interface using the single query service described above.
• Federated access: Combine current and/or historic data into a single, easy-to-query view, without physically building a data warehouse or data mart.
• Dimensional ETL: Build dimensional data warehouses using Cognos Data Manager, an ETL tool for high-performance transformations.

Optimize access for faster data delivery
Other key tools included in the platform help optimize data storage for access:

• Cognos Transformer helps you build and deliver OLAP cubes. The architecture ensures the resulting cube can be accessed by any capability with the single query service.
• Cognos Virtual View Manager provides the option to cache data in virtual views to both speed response times for the user and offload hits on the operational sources.

Expand traditional BI
The Cognos platform expands traditional BI capabilities with real time monitoring and what-if scenario analysis. With real-time monitoring, you can view up-to-the-second relevant information in-context with all other BI information. What-if scenario analysis allows you to model and compare scenarios as well as validate planning assumptions.

IBM Cognos 10 begins a series of new innovations from IBM Business Analytics that will change how your organization makes decisions, allocates resources, anticipates and shapes future outcomes.

IBM Cognos 10 delivers a revolutionary new experience and expands traditional business intelligence (BI) with planning, scenario modeling, real-time monitoring and predictive analytics.

Business users can explore all aspects of their business with a limitless BI workspace that supports the way people think and work.

Underlying IBM Cognos 10 is a proven technology platform that allows for seamless upgrades and cost-effective scalability for the broadest deployments.

With IBM Cognos 10, you and your organization gain the freedom to see more and do more?to make the smarter decisions that drive better business results. See what’s new.

Now you can implement BI in your organization easier than ever before. New books, workshops and training programs are available, along with the services and support you need to achieve excellence in your initiative – from building your strategy to using the software. With Cognos 10, IBM offers more deployment options by expanding our presence on System z, Power Systems, and for the first time, optimized deployment on IBM Compute Cloud.

The complete range of analytics capabilities

Cognos 10 helps your organization make smarter decisions, achieve better results, and gain a deeper understanding of trends, opportunities, weaknesses and threats. Cognos 10 lets you explore any data, in any combination and over any time period with a broad range of analytics capabilities:

Query and Reporting
Comprehensive query and reporting capabilities to make smarter decisions.

Analysis
Analysis for everyone.

Scorecarding
At-a-glance information to successfully link strategy to operations.

Dashboarding
High-impact information presentation to monitor, measure and manage corporate performance.

Real-time Monitoring
Up-to-the second, relevant information within the context of your BI information.

Statistics
Statistical analysis incorporated into your business reporting.
Planning and Budgeting
High-performance enterprise planning software for budgeting, forecasting and analysis.

Extending BI
Convenient methods for delivering business intelligence to a wider audience.

Collaborative BI
Modern tools for collaborating, building stronger teams and stimulating better decisions.

Talk to HAL for more details.

Issues that are common to many organizations, regardless of industry include the ability to make high quality decisions, departmental silos throughout the organization and “rearview” thinking (for example, driving by looking only in the rearview mirror).

Decision-making

The ability to make high quality decisions is central to any organization. As the volume, variety, and velocity of information expands, this ability becomes increasingly difficult. With the state of current data explosion, decision-makers have to respond more quickly and with greater precision than ever.

As technology of all types becomes more robust and sophisticated, the data that is generated spans a multitude of formats, many of which are unstructured and machine-generated (for example, surveillance systems, GPS systems, and others). This situation forces a change in how data is managed so that it is meaningful in decision-making; organizations must look at ways to sort through the data, understand and connect the key pieces of information, and drive smarter business outcomes by leveraging the information assets.

Departmental silos

Many organizations develop natural silos based on various business functions, for example, finance marketing and sales, risk management, or operations. These departments often use separate systems to manage their business objectives, and when considered individually, they can realize a certain degree of effectiveness for driving various objectives. However, when information is not shared among departments, a significant opportunity to realize synergistic benefits is lost. For example, perhaps a marketing department is measuring target conversion rates for a particular campaign, but does not have visibility into which prospects might be bad credit risks and ultimately cost the organization money.

Although organizational, cultural, or political issues can be factors, this disconnect between departments is often a result of the existence of multiple disparate systems within an organization that articulate critical data in different ways: finance data is not directly meaningful to marketers; supply chain and assortment planning data is not expressed the same way as a customer profile. These various views and representations between systems perpetuates the silos and inhibits cross-departmental intelligence. To mitigate this issue, data of all types from multiple sources and systems must be integrated into a common vocabulary that is universally meaningful.

Rearview thinking

Traditional forecasting and business intelligence is grounded on historical data, where expected future outcomes are based on what has happened in the past. This method would be reliable if all conditions and variables of a given experience remain absolutely static, which is clearly impossible given the dynamic nature of people, economies, environmental conditions, technologies, and other variables that affect every decision point in an organization’s operation.

Historical data does become critical in decision-making when it is combined with current data and continuously refreshed with new information. This approach is the basis of predictive decision-making; models are based on what has happened and why, and also on what is happening now and what will likely happen next.

Limitations of traditional approaches

This section describes the ways in which traditional approaches are limited, including types of data used, inability to personalize communications, and a general need to move beyond traditional ways that analytics are positioned within an organization.

Disparate and incomplete data

Many traditional systems, such as those that generate customer interactions, forecast inventory needs, or support public safety, often rely on broad segmentation and historical data that generalize, rather than personalize, customers and constituents. These forms of historical data may include demographic data and transactional history and are often expressed in structured formats that allow for fundamental analysis (slicing). However, because behaviors are motivated by a variety of dynamic human factors that extend beyond static datapoints, relying on such data provides an incomplete picture. This is particularly true when considering the rich insights that are available in many unstructured formats that are overlooked in fundamental analytic solutions. These data types, which comprise the vast majority of available data, provide critical insights into motivations behind various behaviors such as preferences and desires of customers.

This attitudinal data is the key to differentiating customers within a larger segment. For example, individuals living in a particular postal code might differ significantly in their reasons for living there (convenience, proximity to job and family, culture and weather, and so on). Understanding the underlying reason for a particular behavior unlocks the insights in otherwise static datapoints that allow for prediction of future behaviors.

Similarly, visibility into performance and metrics using business intelligence (BI) tools is critical to managing performance, as is the ability to perform financial analysis. However, if the data is incomplete (that is, limited to historical instances only), the ability to make high-quality decisions throughout the enterprise becomes severely limited.

One-size-fits-all and one-way communication

The systems through which an organization interacts with “the world,” for example, with its customers or constituents, often convey single, undifferentiated messages and usually support only a one-way flow of information. This approach misses opportunities to tailor communication and to learn from interactions.

Standard customer relationship management (CRM) systems, for example, are fundamental to managing customer interactions. They ensure that interactions occur consistently (often through automation) and efficiently, and are recorded. However, these CRM systems also have severe limitations with regard to understanding individual customers and creating customized interactions that will ultimately be more effective and profitable. They often stop at the one-to-many level rather than offering the finer-grained differentiation that creates a one-to-one customized experience. Traditional systems are also often unidirectional: they “shout” offers at customers with little attention to personalization.

The need for a paradigm shift

True predictive capability is absent, or at best rudimentary, in traditional industry solutions. As a result, organizations focus on sensing and then responding to issues, which is a reactive stance. Often, the damage (churn, fraudulent activity, excessive marketing spend) has already occurred, and the goal then becomes to minimize the impact on the organization. Traditional organizations also often rely on the instinct and intuition of resident experts rather than positioning it at the critical point of impact.Automation is also widely touted in traditional systems. Although the ability to automate is important, even more important is the optimization of decisions, or making the right decision at the right moment.

Contact HAL Partners for more information.

A Need for a New Approach:

Business leaders know that to meet their goals for profitability, revenue, cost reduction, and risk management, especially in the current economy, they cannot continue to operate the way they have in the past. Today’s marketplace involves an exponential increase in the number and source of customer interactions; it is now a high-volume, multi-channel game. Organizations have to find new ways to compete and use technology to become smarter.

Through better management and use of information, business leaders can remove the blind spots that hinder informed decisions, and also achieve the next generation of efficiencies by providing precise, contextual analytics and insight at the point where these items can make a direct impact on business (point of impact). Doing so can enable micro-optimization, improving insight into patterns of customers, processes, and businesses, and deliver better real-time decisions and actions in every area of the organization.

This micro-optimization is made possible by establishing well-constructed processes and empowering individuals throughout the organization with pervasive, predictive real-time analytics. This approach can help shift from a sense-and-respond focus to a forward-looking predict-and-act focus. This approach also moves analysis from a back-office activity limited to a handful of experts to an approach that can empower everyone in the organization at the point of impact and in the context of the current situation. The result is rapid, informed, and confident decisions and actions throughout the organization, based on consistent and trusted information.

Analytics for a Smarter Planet

As a key element of enabling smarter decision-making through advanced analytics, SPSS was acquired by IBM in October 2009. SPSS had established itself as a leader in predictive analytics; SPSS drove the vision of predictive analytics and the emergence of this market. In its over 40-year history, though, the SPSS aim has been the same: to drive the widespread use of data in decision-making.

IBM SPSS Predictive Analytics is a software portfolio that provides data collection, statistics, predictive modeling, and deployment capabilities. These capabilities enable the end-goal of improving outcomes through decision management. IBM SPSS Predictive Analytics, collectively, is the combination of various capabilities that integrate multiple data sources for statistical, mathematical, and other algorithmic analyses, and decision management, which effectively deploys these predictions and allows actions to be taken based on these analytical insights. The results are higher quality decisions, measurably better outcomes, and higher returns on investment.

The Evolution of Decision-Making

Historically, decisions have been made on the basis of anecdotal experience, or hunches, of seasoned domain experts. These “gut feel” decisions, though, are subjective and often inconsistent, thereby limiting their value.

Having the need to standardize key decisions and make them more consistent and reliable, many organizations have moved toward automated decision-making by using business rules. Although this automation provides a degree of efficiency and objective consistency, and improves the collective quality of decisions, static rules quickly obsolesce in ever-changing situations and conditions, and the limits of this approach become apparent.

Predictive decision-making, based on analysis of historical patterns and current conditions, is the basis for the highest quality means of making decisions. The reasons are because the models consider all available data, and also continuously adapt to new information, becoming smarter over time. With predictive analytics, the right decision for the given conditions can be made at the point of impact at the time when the decision needs to be made. Decisions are now customized for each unique case, rather than using generalizations for the aggregate.

Why Predictive Analytics: The Real ROI

The power of predictive analytics in driving optimal outcomes and profitable revenue growth is clearly demonstrated by organizations that deploy predictive solutions. An independent financial impact study by IDC1 found that the median return on investment (ROI) for the projects that incorporated predictive technologies was 145%, compared with a median ROI of 89% for those projects that did not.

An independent assessment of SPSS customers found that 94% achieved a positive ROI with an average payback period of 10.7 months. Returns were achieved through reduced costs, increased productivity, increased employee and customer satisfaction, and greater visibility. Flexibility, performance, and price were all key factors in purchase decisions.

IBM offers strong capabilities in information management, reporting and analysis, and with the addition of SPSS, now can offer users predictive power that leverages both structured and unstructured data. This provides IBM SPSS users a distinct advantage as advanced analytics becomes a mainstream table stake in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace.

Contact HAL Partners for more information.