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New Ownership Not Holding Back Cognos BI Innovation

Over the next few weeks I will be attending presentations from several BI Vendors updating the industry on the latest advancements in their solutions.

After the mass consolidation of the BI vendor market in 2007, the industry has been somewhat nervous as to how the larger parent companies would impact their new third party BI vendor subsidiaries. On the solution front, it seems that so far is more than so good.

At the Cognos 8 presentation this morning, under its new IBM flag, we were treated to a new level of user configuration, further releasing such tasks from the job sheets of IT. Whislt this may send shivers down the spines of many business managers fearful that further configuration features equates directly to more complication, it seems that in fact the opposite is true. Not only has Cognos expanded the user tool set, but it has further simplified the configuration with helpful wizards and user added notes.

Note facilities are great negotiation platforms upon which to build collaboration in BI. For instance, if we take the most horrendous part of any BI implementation – data quality, the tools provide for data stewards in each part of the business to take ownership of their data set and for local definitions of meta data definitions to be added to the standard business value library. Much of the territorial infighting over the adoption of one single business term for say “revenue” is that legacy systems with less flexibility in nomenclature still use alternative terminology such as “gross income” or just “income”. The tool allows for each part of the business to flag such values and add their local definition, to help their departmental users to feel more confident in what data they are reading.

This is just one example of the understanding of difficulties in BI implementation that have been carefully considered by Cognos in expanding its software capability. Read more about Cognos 8 BI here.

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