Description
Midsize companies have six strategies in common when choosing and deploying BI solutions that address both business and IT challenges.
Business Analytics
IBM Software IBM Cognos Business Intelligence
A business intelligence agenda
for midsize organizations:
Six strategies for success
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
2
Contents
2 Abstract
2 Overview
3 Business problems
4 Business drivers
5 The solution
10 Conclusion
11 About IBM Business Analytics
Abstract
Midsize companies see business intelligence (BI) as too
unwieldy and expensive for them, and use spreadsheets for
planning, budgeting, and forecasting. In reality, the spread-
sheets are the real expense and time-consumers.
However, BI is well within reach of your midsize organization
through an incremental approach, matching project rollout
with resources, bene?ting quickly, justifying further investment
and adjusting rapidly to business changes.
Midsize companies have six strategies in common when
choosing and deploying BI solutions that address both
business and IT challenges. You can choose the one that
?ts your company.
Overview
Midsize organizations are feeling the pain of too much data
and inconsistent information. With growing volumes of data
and data sources, midsize companies need to unlock the data
in operational systems and applications and transform it into
useful, relevant information. With an accurate, up-to-the-
minute view of the business, everyone can better collaborate
to make sound strategic decisions.
This is why performance management has emerged as a
strategic imperative in midsize organizations. Small to midsize
businesses , along with business units and departments within
larger organizations, need to grapple with issues that in?uence
business performance and rapidly gain the insights to deal
with them efciently and efectively. BI is central to gaining
competitive advantage and higher pro?ts.
Business Analytics
3
Optimal business performance is possible when decision
makers understand what is happening, why it is happening
and what they should do about it. Ideally, you want your users
to make sound, data-driven decisions at every level and every
function of the business. In a performance management
framework, midsize organizations can efciently deliver the
right reports, the right dashboards and the right information
to suit the needs of the business.
This paper describes the particular performance management
requirements of the midsize organization and provides six
strategies for success drawn from the experiences of actual
IBM Cognos family customers.
Business problems
Challenges facing the business
Midsize organizations have the same business challenges
as their larger counterparts. The diference for midsize
organizations is that they need to be more agile, faster and
smarter to react to competitive pressures—and do all of
this on limited budgets and with fewer resources.
Business users in midsize organizations need to be empowered
with immediate insight into how the business is performing.
Without the right information, users are unable to make the
best revenue-generating decisions, the best cost-saving decisions
and decisions that make the most of their business assets.
Many midsize organizations still rely extensively on
spreadsheets, not only in ?nance departments for planning,
budgeting and forecasting, but also for reporting. This
pervasive practice carries signi?cant risks. Spreadsheets are
highly error-prone, and it is often impossible to trace the
logic of their creators, requiring constant checking and
re-creation of the same data. Spreadsheets are also difcult
to consolidate, making them slow, unreliable and inefcient
for gleaning meaningful insights.
No longer can strategic decisions be left to trial and error.
Midsize organizations need solutions to address the enormous
competitive pressures they are facing. Unfortunately, BI and
performance management applications are often perceived as
too expensive and complex, suitable only for the budgets and
resources of larger organizations.
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
4
Challenges facing IT
Information technology leaders in midsize organizations
recognize the value of BI, but they are faced with countless
challenges:
• Lack of staf and skilled resources. IT professionals in most
midsize organizations have to wear many hats and juggle
multiple priorities. With lean stafs, they often lack the
experience to deploy and maintain BI and performance
management solutions.
• Lack of budget. IT needs solutions that are predictable
with no hidden costs. They must also deliver the shortest
possible time to value, demonstrating the advantage of BI
and performance management by delivering a quick win
for the business. Importantly, the solution also needs to be
able to grow and scale as business needs grow.
With the number of data sources and the volume of data
growing rapidly, IT struggles with the challenge of turning
data into useful information. Faced with these pressures, IT
remains ill-equipped to respond to the increasing demands
of the business.
Business drivers
To address the challenges of improving performance and
driving competitive advantage, BI solutions require multiple
capabilities to address a variety of needs and issues. For
example, dashboard and scorecard capabilities measure
business performance and answer the “How are you doing?”
question. Reporting and analysis capabilities answer the
“Why” behind critical issues, trends and opportunities.
Planning capabilities answer, “What should we be doing?”
These capabilities must also be integrated and modular, so
midsize businesses can implement them incrementally, and
start anywhere—say, with planning or analysis or reporting—
and then move to where the need is greatest as business needs
dictate. The midsize organization can deploy the solution
tactically for diferent departments and then connect initiatives
as they evolve.
With limited IT budgets and resource constraints, IT managers
are looking beyond the initial price tag. BI solutions must not
only ?t your budget, but also place minimal ongoing demand
on IT resources, with low maintenance and as little downtime
as possible, so business users can focus on growing the business.
Business Analytics
5
Vertical and horizontal solutions that can be used immediately
are also needed to accelerate success, with prebuilt function-
ality for departmental or industry-speci?c needs. Service and
support are also critical requirements, and midsize organiza-
tions will bene?t from a strong network of solution service
providers to assist when and where additional skilled
resources are needed.
The solution
The Cognos 10 family is a comprehensive portfolio of
integrated solutions to manage business performance. These
solutions come with packaging and pricing options tailored
to midsize enterprises. Flexible delivery models range from
hosted solutions to prepackaged hardware appliances and,
of course, on-premises software. And 3,000-plus Business
Partners help extend our ability to support your needs.
IBM understands that rapid time to value is critical for
midsize organizations. Cognos business intelligence and
performance management software provides best practices,
blueprints, analytic applications, services, training and
support—all designed to accelerate your deployment. IBM’s
objective is to advance and enhance our solutions continually
to ensure you gain economies of scale. Above all, you can feel
con?dent in choosing a world-class BI and performance
management solution, ensuring widespread user adoption
while keeping IT costs and complexity at bay.
Six strategies for a successful BI agenda
IBM Cognos solutions are based on conversations with
hundreds of successful midsize customers that have made
BI a reality in their organizations. These conversations
have identi?ed six strategies that the companies have in
common. Overall, these strategies address both business
and IT challenges.
Figure 1: A comprehensive portfolio of integrated solutions to
manage business performance
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
6
1. Start small, but think big with room to expand and grow
IT professionals in many midsize organizations often perceive
that BI and performance management are expensive and
resource-intensive, suited only for larger organizations. IBM
Cognos software customers have proven this is not the case.
Deploying BI and performance management should be viewed
as a strategic initiative, so think big. However, rather than
taking an “all or nothing” approach, your organization can
deploy tactically and incrementally, connecting the initiatives
together as they are added.
So, start by focusing on a key pain point. With the Cognos
10 family products, you can start anywhere—say, with just
reporting, or analysis or planning—and add additional
capabilities as the business grows and needs change. Many
successful midsize organizations have taken this incremental
approach. The bene?ts are many: project rollout can match
resource capacity and budget; your organization realizes
business bene?t quickly; a successful implementation provides
justi?cation for further investment; and it enables rapid
adjustments in response to changes in business objectives.
Engaging with the business is also a key criterion for success.
Creating a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC)
or similar entity helps ensure that knowledge gained is shared
across the organization.
Cognos 10 family solutions are designed to be modular, so you
can implement and expand BI and performance management
capabilities as your needs dictate or as your company grows.
Equally important is the ability to connect all the initiatives
for successful BI deployment throughout your organization,
reducing the need for multiple tools from multiple vendors
and therefore minimizing complexity, resources and costs.
2. Ensure all reporting types are supported
Reporting is repeatedly identi?ed as the most important
BI requirement. However, it’s important to remember
that diferent categories of business users have distinct
reporting needs:
• Managed reporting is needed to distribute prebuilt reports
throughout an organization daily, weekly or monthly, often
providing ?exible prompting so users can run variations of
reports themselves without the need to recreate the reports.
• Ad hoc reporting is a critical aspect of enabling user self
service, giving business users instant access and interactivity
with information to create their own ad hoc reports. This
type of reporting must be simple to use, with a drag-and-
drop interface, and information must be presented in the
context they understand.
Business Analytics
7
• Analytical reporting enables business users to slice and dice
information so they can easily understand the “why” behind
critical issues, trends and opportunities, with the ability to
drill down further for detailed information.
• Dashboards help measure business performance and quickly
communicate complex information to business users in
compelling visual formats, so they have a clear picture of
how the business is doing.
• Production reports provide high-quality detailed information
such as invoices or statements, and these reports are highly
formatted.
• Operational or transactional reports typically have detailed
information from transactional systems, so ensuring secure
and controlled data access is key.
Not all companies have all these needs at once. However, as
your business grows and reporting needs change, the right
BI solution will answer all your reporting needs both today
and in the future. Your business and IT leaders can have
greater peace of mind, knowing you won’t have to deploy
multiple reporting products from multiple vendors, which
adds complexity to your systems, demands more IT resources
and creates silos that hinder your ability to take advantage of
success from one initiative to another in other functions.
Cognos Business Intelligence software ofers zero-footprint,
web-based reporting solutions that address all your reporting
needs, all your diferent users and all the types of data that you
have. Deliver reports anywhere, without data duplication.
3. Enable access anywhere, anytime
Customers want to put information in the hands of a broad
range of users and bring it into familiar working environments
they use each day, which helps to increase the adoption of
BI in the organization. It is also important to ensure no
duplication of work is needed to use the many delivery models.
Figure 2: Reports can be accessed online or on the go with the Apple iPad.
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
8
Cognos software helps make it possible for users to see the
information they want, how they want it, when they want it.
Reports are authored once, but published anywhere, to save
enormous resource time and duplication. They can be viewed
in multiple formats—on the web, as Adobe PDF ?les, in
Microsoft Ofce applications or on mobile devices such as
the Apple iPad.
For business analysts who prefer to work in a spreadsheet,
IBM ofers an extension to Microsoft Excel that allows users to
access centrally modeled and secure information using
their tool of choice.
4. Open access to all data
A company’s data is one of its biggest assets—second only to
its people. The challenge lies in extracting that data from
multiple sources and transforming it into useful and relevant
information that puts it in context for the business user.
Midsize organizations rarely have just one data source.
As applications are purchased and deployed, the sources
and formats of data grow rapidly. Data may come from
transactional systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP)
solutions, data warehouses, older systems or from online
analytical processing (OLAP) sources. Data needs to be
accessed from multiple sources, even when you have a data
warehouse, to address all the information needs and requests
from business users.
A critical factor for BI success is ensuring that easy and open
access is supported for all types of data sources from your BI
solution. Cognos software has an open architecture to ensure
access to all sources, as well as any combination of sources, so
reports can access data wherever it resides.
The speed of data access is equally important, and Cognos
software provides direct access to data with query optimization
and Enterprise Information Integration (EII) technology that
further optimizes data access with virtual caching from
multiple sources.
5. Optimize Information delivery
Another key success factor is ensuring that everyone in the
organization is working from the same data and using the
same business rules. More often than not, business users are
struggling to produce consistent results from manual
processes, error-prone spreadsheets or diferent tools that
use diferent queries with diferent rules to access data.
Business Analytics
9
To ensure data consistency and accuracy and that users are
working from the same numbers, a best practice approach is
to have one place to de?ne the data, a single query service to
retrieve the data and one place to centrally manage the
business rules. When everyone works from the same data,
query and business rules, business users can have con?dence
in the results. With multiple tools from multiple vendors,
achieving this goal is highly unlikely.
With a common business model provided by Cognos
software, users have access to a complete, consistent view of
information, no matter which BI capability they use. Users
are empowered with the right data, everyone is working from
the same numbers, and data complexity is hidden from them.
6. Ensure easy deployment and maintenance
IT professionals understand the value of performance manage-
ment, but may be concerned about the cost, complexity and
resources needed for maintaining a performance management
system over time. For this reason, Cognos software provides
?exible maintenance and support solutions that are tailored to
each organization and maximize internal resources.
Built from the ground up as a web services-based, service-
oriented architecture (SOA), the Cognos 10 family of solutions
is, by nature, open. With support for your existing data
sources, security systems, portals, application servers and
more, Cognos software ofers a full range of BI and planning
capabilities that help ease the burdens of deployment and
maintenance. An open platform uses your existing infra-
structure, while also protecting any future investments.
For example, you can view a snapshot of system health, with
live insight into key metrics of system performance, enabling
you to proactively manage your deployment. Also, simpli?ed
upgrade management capability helps you handle any volume
of reports and to test out your system when there are
environmental changes.
IBM Cognos software is the BI and performance management
choice for many midsize organizations. Learn how workgroups
and midsize companies worldwide have bene?ted at: ibm.com/
software/analytics/cognos/express/success_stories.html
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
10
Conclusion
Let’s go back for a moment to the three questions that drive
performance: “How are we doing?” “Why?” “What should
we be doing?” Answering these key questions requires
multiple integrated capabilities. IBM Cognos software delivers
a comprehensive portfolio of solutions and capabilities to
enable your business users to see the information they want,
how they want it and when they want it.
The Cognos 10 family of products delivers the essential
foundation for business intelligence, performance manage-
ment and business analytics solutions. These products are
designed to work together to help individuals, workgroups
and entire organizations gain value from applying analytics
to every business decision.
Cognos 10 family products are right-sized for your
organization and integrated so you can start addressing your
most pressing needs with the con?dence that you can grow
your solution to meet future requirements. For example:
• Initial deployments can address the needs of individuals by
instantly deploying the desktop capabilities of IBM Cognos
Insight for data discovery and planning.
• Workgroups or departments can grow to share that insight
through a server, add reports on larger data sets and interact
with them on mobile devices with Cognos Express.
• Organizations can combine those insights with real-time and
corporate information, out them in scorecards and deploy
them broadly with IBM Cognos Enterprise.
Understanding the need for easy deployment and maintenance
for resource-constrained IT departments, IBM Cognos
solutions were built on open standards, web services and SOA
architecture designed to use existing infrastructure and future
investments. We provide support for data sources, security,
portals and more, to ensure ease of deployment and minimal
maintenance requirements.
Lastly, a network of more than 3,000 IBM Business Partners
is ready to help accelerate your deployments and make
you successful.
Business Analytics
11
About IBM Business Analytics
IBM Business Analytics software delivers actionable insights
decision-makers need to achieve better business performance.
IBM ofers a comprehensive, uni?ed portfolio of business
intelligence, predictive and advanced analytics, ?nancial
performance and strategy management, governance, risk and
compliance and analytic applications.
With IBM software, companies can spot trends, patterns and
anomalies, compare “what if” scenarios, predict potential
threats and opportunities, identify and manage key business
risks and plan, budget and forecast resources. With these
deep analytic capabilities our customers around the world can
better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes.
For more information
For further information, please visit
ibm.com/business-analytics
Request a call
To request a call or to ask a question, go to
ibm.com/business-analytics/contactus. An IBM
representative will respond to your inquiry within
two business days.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
IBM Corporation
Software Group
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Produced in the United States of America
April 2012
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and Cognos are trademarks of International
Business Machines Corporation, registered in many jurisdictions world-
wide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or
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Midsize companies have six strategies in common when choosing and deploying BI solutions that address both business and IT challenges.
Business Analytics
IBM Software IBM Cognos Business Intelligence
A business intelligence agenda
for midsize organizations:
Six strategies for success
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
2
Contents
2 Abstract
2 Overview
3 Business problems
4 Business drivers
5 The solution
10 Conclusion
11 About IBM Business Analytics
Abstract
Midsize companies see business intelligence (BI) as too
unwieldy and expensive for them, and use spreadsheets for
planning, budgeting, and forecasting. In reality, the spread-
sheets are the real expense and time-consumers.
However, BI is well within reach of your midsize organization
through an incremental approach, matching project rollout
with resources, bene?ting quickly, justifying further investment
and adjusting rapidly to business changes.
Midsize companies have six strategies in common when
choosing and deploying BI solutions that address both
business and IT challenges. You can choose the one that
?ts your company.
Overview
Midsize organizations are feeling the pain of too much data
and inconsistent information. With growing volumes of data
and data sources, midsize companies need to unlock the data
in operational systems and applications and transform it into
useful, relevant information. With an accurate, up-to-the-
minute view of the business, everyone can better collaborate
to make sound strategic decisions.
This is why performance management has emerged as a
strategic imperative in midsize organizations. Small to midsize
businesses , along with business units and departments within
larger organizations, need to grapple with issues that in?uence
business performance and rapidly gain the insights to deal
with them efciently and efectively. BI is central to gaining
competitive advantage and higher pro?ts.
Business Analytics
3
Optimal business performance is possible when decision
makers understand what is happening, why it is happening
and what they should do about it. Ideally, you want your users
to make sound, data-driven decisions at every level and every
function of the business. In a performance management
framework, midsize organizations can efciently deliver the
right reports, the right dashboards and the right information
to suit the needs of the business.
This paper describes the particular performance management
requirements of the midsize organization and provides six
strategies for success drawn from the experiences of actual
IBM Cognos family customers.
Business problems
Challenges facing the business
Midsize organizations have the same business challenges
as their larger counterparts. The diference for midsize
organizations is that they need to be more agile, faster and
smarter to react to competitive pressures—and do all of
this on limited budgets and with fewer resources.
Business users in midsize organizations need to be empowered
with immediate insight into how the business is performing.
Without the right information, users are unable to make the
best revenue-generating decisions, the best cost-saving decisions
and decisions that make the most of their business assets.
Many midsize organizations still rely extensively on
spreadsheets, not only in ?nance departments for planning,
budgeting and forecasting, but also for reporting. This
pervasive practice carries signi?cant risks. Spreadsheets are
highly error-prone, and it is often impossible to trace the
logic of their creators, requiring constant checking and
re-creation of the same data. Spreadsheets are also difcult
to consolidate, making them slow, unreliable and inefcient
for gleaning meaningful insights.
No longer can strategic decisions be left to trial and error.
Midsize organizations need solutions to address the enormous
competitive pressures they are facing. Unfortunately, BI and
performance management applications are often perceived as
too expensive and complex, suitable only for the budgets and
resources of larger organizations.
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
4
Challenges facing IT
Information technology leaders in midsize organizations
recognize the value of BI, but they are faced with countless
challenges:
• Lack of staf and skilled resources. IT professionals in most
midsize organizations have to wear many hats and juggle
multiple priorities. With lean stafs, they often lack the
experience to deploy and maintain BI and performance
management solutions.
• Lack of budget. IT needs solutions that are predictable
with no hidden costs. They must also deliver the shortest
possible time to value, demonstrating the advantage of BI
and performance management by delivering a quick win
for the business. Importantly, the solution also needs to be
able to grow and scale as business needs grow.
With the number of data sources and the volume of data
growing rapidly, IT struggles with the challenge of turning
data into useful information. Faced with these pressures, IT
remains ill-equipped to respond to the increasing demands
of the business.
Business drivers
To address the challenges of improving performance and
driving competitive advantage, BI solutions require multiple
capabilities to address a variety of needs and issues. For
example, dashboard and scorecard capabilities measure
business performance and answer the “How are you doing?”
question. Reporting and analysis capabilities answer the
“Why” behind critical issues, trends and opportunities.
Planning capabilities answer, “What should we be doing?”
These capabilities must also be integrated and modular, so
midsize businesses can implement them incrementally, and
start anywhere—say, with planning or analysis or reporting—
and then move to where the need is greatest as business needs
dictate. The midsize organization can deploy the solution
tactically for diferent departments and then connect initiatives
as they evolve.
With limited IT budgets and resource constraints, IT managers
are looking beyond the initial price tag. BI solutions must not
only ?t your budget, but also place minimal ongoing demand
on IT resources, with low maintenance and as little downtime
as possible, so business users can focus on growing the business.
Business Analytics
5
Vertical and horizontal solutions that can be used immediately
are also needed to accelerate success, with prebuilt function-
ality for departmental or industry-speci?c needs. Service and
support are also critical requirements, and midsize organiza-
tions will bene?t from a strong network of solution service
providers to assist when and where additional skilled
resources are needed.
The solution
The Cognos 10 family is a comprehensive portfolio of
integrated solutions to manage business performance. These
solutions come with packaging and pricing options tailored
to midsize enterprises. Flexible delivery models range from
hosted solutions to prepackaged hardware appliances and,
of course, on-premises software. And 3,000-plus Business
Partners help extend our ability to support your needs.
IBM understands that rapid time to value is critical for
midsize organizations. Cognos business intelligence and
performance management software provides best practices,
blueprints, analytic applications, services, training and
support—all designed to accelerate your deployment. IBM’s
objective is to advance and enhance our solutions continually
to ensure you gain economies of scale. Above all, you can feel
con?dent in choosing a world-class BI and performance
management solution, ensuring widespread user adoption
while keeping IT costs and complexity at bay.
Six strategies for a successful BI agenda
IBM Cognos solutions are based on conversations with
hundreds of successful midsize customers that have made
BI a reality in their organizations. These conversations
have identi?ed six strategies that the companies have in
common. Overall, these strategies address both business
and IT challenges.
Figure 1: A comprehensive portfolio of integrated solutions to
manage business performance
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
6
1. Start small, but think big with room to expand and grow
IT professionals in many midsize organizations often perceive
that BI and performance management are expensive and
resource-intensive, suited only for larger organizations. IBM
Cognos software customers have proven this is not the case.
Deploying BI and performance management should be viewed
as a strategic initiative, so think big. However, rather than
taking an “all or nothing” approach, your organization can
deploy tactically and incrementally, connecting the initiatives
together as they are added.
So, start by focusing on a key pain point. With the Cognos
10 family products, you can start anywhere—say, with just
reporting, or analysis or planning—and add additional
capabilities as the business grows and needs change. Many
successful midsize organizations have taken this incremental
approach. The bene?ts are many: project rollout can match
resource capacity and budget; your organization realizes
business bene?t quickly; a successful implementation provides
justi?cation for further investment; and it enables rapid
adjustments in response to changes in business objectives.
Engaging with the business is also a key criterion for success.
Creating a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC)
or similar entity helps ensure that knowledge gained is shared
across the organization.
Cognos 10 family solutions are designed to be modular, so you
can implement and expand BI and performance management
capabilities as your needs dictate or as your company grows.
Equally important is the ability to connect all the initiatives
for successful BI deployment throughout your organization,
reducing the need for multiple tools from multiple vendors
and therefore minimizing complexity, resources and costs.
2. Ensure all reporting types are supported
Reporting is repeatedly identi?ed as the most important
BI requirement. However, it’s important to remember
that diferent categories of business users have distinct
reporting needs:
• Managed reporting is needed to distribute prebuilt reports
throughout an organization daily, weekly or monthly, often
providing ?exible prompting so users can run variations of
reports themselves without the need to recreate the reports.
• Ad hoc reporting is a critical aspect of enabling user self
service, giving business users instant access and interactivity
with information to create their own ad hoc reports. This
type of reporting must be simple to use, with a drag-and-
drop interface, and information must be presented in the
context they understand.
Business Analytics
7
• Analytical reporting enables business users to slice and dice
information so they can easily understand the “why” behind
critical issues, trends and opportunities, with the ability to
drill down further for detailed information.
• Dashboards help measure business performance and quickly
communicate complex information to business users in
compelling visual formats, so they have a clear picture of
how the business is doing.
• Production reports provide high-quality detailed information
such as invoices or statements, and these reports are highly
formatted.
• Operational or transactional reports typically have detailed
information from transactional systems, so ensuring secure
and controlled data access is key.
Not all companies have all these needs at once. However, as
your business grows and reporting needs change, the right
BI solution will answer all your reporting needs both today
and in the future. Your business and IT leaders can have
greater peace of mind, knowing you won’t have to deploy
multiple reporting products from multiple vendors, which
adds complexity to your systems, demands more IT resources
and creates silos that hinder your ability to take advantage of
success from one initiative to another in other functions.
Cognos Business Intelligence software ofers zero-footprint,
web-based reporting solutions that address all your reporting
needs, all your diferent users and all the types of data that you
have. Deliver reports anywhere, without data duplication.
3. Enable access anywhere, anytime
Customers want to put information in the hands of a broad
range of users and bring it into familiar working environments
they use each day, which helps to increase the adoption of
BI in the organization. It is also important to ensure no
duplication of work is needed to use the many delivery models.
Figure 2: Reports can be accessed online or on the go with the Apple iPad.
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
8
Cognos software helps make it possible for users to see the
information they want, how they want it, when they want it.
Reports are authored once, but published anywhere, to save
enormous resource time and duplication. They can be viewed
in multiple formats—on the web, as Adobe PDF ?les, in
Microsoft Ofce applications or on mobile devices such as
the Apple iPad.
For business analysts who prefer to work in a spreadsheet,
IBM ofers an extension to Microsoft Excel that allows users to
access centrally modeled and secure information using
their tool of choice.
4. Open access to all data
A company’s data is one of its biggest assets—second only to
its people. The challenge lies in extracting that data from
multiple sources and transforming it into useful and relevant
information that puts it in context for the business user.
Midsize organizations rarely have just one data source.
As applications are purchased and deployed, the sources
and formats of data grow rapidly. Data may come from
transactional systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP)
solutions, data warehouses, older systems or from online
analytical processing (OLAP) sources. Data needs to be
accessed from multiple sources, even when you have a data
warehouse, to address all the information needs and requests
from business users.
A critical factor for BI success is ensuring that easy and open
access is supported for all types of data sources from your BI
solution. Cognos software has an open architecture to ensure
access to all sources, as well as any combination of sources, so
reports can access data wherever it resides.
The speed of data access is equally important, and Cognos
software provides direct access to data with query optimization
and Enterprise Information Integration (EII) technology that
further optimizes data access with virtual caching from
multiple sources.
5. Optimize Information delivery
Another key success factor is ensuring that everyone in the
organization is working from the same data and using the
same business rules. More often than not, business users are
struggling to produce consistent results from manual
processes, error-prone spreadsheets or diferent tools that
use diferent queries with diferent rules to access data.
Business Analytics
9
To ensure data consistency and accuracy and that users are
working from the same numbers, a best practice approach is
to have one place to de?ne the data, a single query service to
retrieve the data and one place to centrally manage the
business rules. When everyone works from the same data,
query and business rules, business users can have con?dence
in the results. With multiple tools from multiple vendors,
achieving this goal is highly unlikely.
With a common business model provided by Cognos
software, users have access to a complete, consistent view of
information, no matter which BI capability they use. Users
are empowered with the right data, everyone is working from
the same numbers, and data complexity is hidden from them.
6. Ensure easy deployment and maintenance
IT professionals understand the value of performance manage-
ment, but may be concerned about the cost, complexity and
resources needed for maintaining a performance management
system over time. For this reason, Cognos software provides
?exible maintenance and support solutions that are tailored to
each organization and maximize internal resources.
Built from the ground up as a web services-based, service-
oriented architecture (SOA), the Cognos 10 family of solutions
is, by nature, open. With support for your existing data
sources, security systems, portals, application servers and
more, Cognos software ofers a full range of BI and planning
capabilities that help ease the burdens of deployment and
maintenance. An open platform uses your existing infra-
structure, while also protecting any future investments.
For example, you can view a snapshot of system health, with
live insight into key metrics of system performance, enabling
you to proactively manage your deployment. Also, simpli?ed
upgrade management capability helps you handle any volume
of reports and to test out your system when there are
environmental changes.
IBM Cognos software is the BI and performance management
choice for many midsize organizations. Learn how workgroups
and midsize companies worldwide have bene?ted at: ibm.com/
software/analytics/cognos/express/success_stories.html
A business intelligence agenda for midsize organizations: Six strategies for success
10
Conclusion
Let’s go back for a moment to the three questions that drive
performance: “How are we doing?” “Why?” “What should
we be doing?” Answering these key questions requires
multiple integrated capabilities. IBM Cognos software delivers
a comprehensive portfolio of solutions and capabilities to
enable your business users to see the information they want,
how they want it and when they want it.
The Cognos 10 family of products delivers the essential
foundation for business intelligence, performance manage-
ment and business analytics solutions. These products are
designed to work together to help individuals, workgroups
and entire organizations gain value from applying analytics
to every business decision.
Cognos 10 family products are right-sized for your
organization and integrated so you can start addressing your
most pressing needs with the con?dence that you can grow
your solution to meet future requirements. For example:
• Initial deployments can address the needs of individuals by
instantly deploying the desktop capabilities of IBM Cognos
Insight for data discovery and planning.
• Workgroups or departments can grow to share that insight
through a server, add reports on larger data sets and interact
with them on mobile devices with Cognos Express.
• Organizations can combine those insights with real-time and
corporate information, out them in scorecards and deploy
them broadly with IBM Cognos Enterprise.
Understanding the need for easy deployment and maintenance
for resource-constrained IT departments, IBM Cognos
solutions were built on open standards, web services and SOA
architecture designed to use existing infrastructure and future
investments. We provide support for data sources, security,
portals and more, to ensure ease of deployment and minimal
maintenance requirements.
Lastly, a network of more than 3,000 IBM Business Partners
is ready to help accelerate your deployments and make
you successful.
Business Analytics
11
About IBM Business Analytics
IBM Business Analytics software delivers actionable insights
decision-makers need to achieve better business performance.
IBM ofers a comprehensive, uni?ed portfolio of business
intelligence, predictive and advanced analytics, ?nancial
performance and strategy management, governance, risk and
compliance and analytic applications.
With IBM software, companies can spot trends, patterns and
anomalies, compare “what if” scenarios, predict potential
threats and opportunities, identify and manage key business
risks and plan, budget and forecast resources. With these
deep analytic capabilities our customers around the world can
better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes.
For more information
For further information, please visit
ibm.com/business-analytics
Request a call
To request a call or to ask a question, go to
ibm.com/business-analytics/contactus. An IBM
representative will respond to your inquiry within
two business days.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012
IBM Corporation
Software Group
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Produced in the United States of America
April 2012
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