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The intent of the Capstone Newsletter is to keep you informed of industry trends that can shape how you do business. You will also find information on upcoming technology events as well as interesting and timely technology articles.
We hope you find the information in this newsletter relevant. Your feedback on these or potential future topics is welcome at feedback@capstonec.com.
Business Intelligence (BI) is making a big splash in the
software industry market as of late. A quick Google search will reveal
a great deal of BI activity. All the key software vendors are there
– Oracle, Microsoft, IBM… and for good reason. In
highly competitive markets, BI can be the key to staying ahead. In
sales-driven companies, BI can quickly put the spotlight on an untapped
area of the market.
One of the biggest players in the BI game is a 38 year
old Canadian company named Cognos. For this newsletter we will take a
look at one of the cornerstones of Cognos’s BI product
– Reporting.
Cognos’s website says, “Cognos 8
Business Intelligence is the only BI product to deliver the complete
range of BI capabilities: reporting, analysis, scorecarding,
dashboards, business event management as well as data integration, on a
single, proven architecture.”
As you can see, Reporting is just one part of Cognos 8
Business Intelligence. But, it is arguably the most important and
definitely the most used component of Cognos 8 BI. A good report will
allow people with varying degrees of technical experience to view the
information picture they want. This, of course, will lead to business
decisions driven by solid facts.
Cognos 8 BI Reporting provides three core capabilities (or business functions) –
Getting the Information You Need, Seeing Information the Way You Want, and Taking It a Step Farther.
Get the Information You Need
Cognos Reporting enables you to get the data you want on a report. Here are some of the ways:
- Use any data source you want.
Of course you are going to be able to report against your relational database, but what
if you need to report against PeopleSoft (or any other ERP)? What if
you have a WebService that is producing the data that you want to
report against? Cognos Reporting can use data wherever you have it.
- Narrow the focus of reports by filtering data.
You only see the data that is meaningful to you.
See Information the Way You Want
Staring at cold hard data is not on anyone’s
list of favorite things to do. Cognos Reporting not only gives you the
data in the most understandable way, but also lets you soak in that
information in a number of other visual ways.
- Access the web portal from anywhere.
Show your customer a report on their own machine by logging into the web portal from their machine. Even better,
give them a personalized web portal page of their own.
- Produce reports in HTML, PDF, and Excel formats. A few clicks will
produce the format you want.
- Report Types.
Crosstab, Financial, Chart, and Map, to name a few.
- Create and format reports using grouping, headers, footers, and other
formatting options.
- Add value to your reports by using calculations and additional report building techniques.
Your customers can put their
calculators, highlighters, and marking pens away when you calculate
fields, add notes, and shade the information for readability. You can
also highlight exceptional data in your reports to draw attention to
the most important areas on the report.
Take It a Step Farther
These are the things that really add value. With the
following features, you can avoid many of the “I need this
yesterday” type of reports.
- Design Executive Dashboards. Put
that critical day-to-day information right in front of your decision
makers every time they log in to their Cognos portal. When does a
business rule live in a use case, when outside?
- Create interactive reports by building report prompt. This
isn’t the static report you are used to. Users can be prompted to select the
information they want every time the report is run. With this feature,
one report can do what it used to take several reports to do.
- View
related information by setting up drill-through access.
Users can “drill up” to a higher level to see an
overview of the data. Users can “drill down” and
see the data behind the data they are currently viewing. Let your
report users answer their own questions.
Your company may be looking for a reporting tool or
maybe you have just jumped on the BI bandwagon. You maybe already have
a reporting tool and can’t understand what the difference is
between them. Maybe you think to yourself, “Of all the
reporting tools out there… Cognos Reporting is one of
them.” Whatever your position, it might be worth your while
to discover how the largest software company in Canada is doing
reporting.
Capstone has delivered a variety of BI and Data
Warehouse implementations. We help the business make decisions about
how and if to use BI. If you are considering using BI or improving your
use of BI, Capstone can help with expertise in these areas.
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