IBM Cognos Reviews

In the February 2013 Magic Quadrant report, Gartner says that some of the top reasons why customers choose Cognos are IBM's road map and future vision. However, a high percentage of users are concerned with poor performance and difficulty of use.

What are some of the reasons you chose Cognos? What are your main concerns with IBM's product?

If you are a user or are evaluating IBM Cognos, add your comment below or write your own review. Share your opinion with our community!

For how long have you used this product?
- 12 Years

Which features of this product are most valuable to you?
- Quick query ability

Can you give an example of how this product has improved the way your organization functions?
- We use it against our enterprise data warehouse for enterprise views of data and material flow

What areas of this product have room for improvement?
- Visualization

Did you encounter any issues with deployment, stability or scalability?
- Scalability only due to source data issues

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?
- Hyperion and SQL Reporting Services. We need an integrated solution.

Before choosing this product, did you evaluate other options? If so, which ones?
- Essbase, Oracle, SAP

How would you rate the level of customer service and technical support?
- Very Good

Was the initial setup straightforward or complex? In what ways?
- Setup for such a complex tool is always difficult

Did you implement through a vendor team or an in-house one? If through a vendor team, how would you rate their level of expertise?
- We used an outside vendor. Good, but needed some more technical understanding

What is your ROI on this product?
- 3-5 years

What was your original setup cost for this product and what is your day-to-day cost of using this product?
- 2 Million to implement. Not sure

What advice would you give to others looking into implementing this product?
- Do your homework on configuration and server architecture

Most of my experience is with Business Objects. I have done a little with Cognos Elite also. Comparatively I find Business Objects much easier to work with when it comes to customizing the presentation of the data. Neither of the two products does a drill-down as well as you can in Crystal Reports, but they both allow you to create multiple views of the data on one page. Business Object WEBI reports allow you to use multiple universes and multiple report pages in one WEBI document.

Both system will force you to use another layer between the presentation and data layers. In Cognos it is called Framework Manager. In WEBI it is called Universes. Both Universes and Framework Manager define the structure and connections the are usable to the presentation layer. Both middle layers can connect to any kind of database or even spreadsheets on an accessible drive.

Both products will force you to use their WEB portals as an interface into the presentation layer. Both allow you to schedule and deliver reports in multiple formats and in a variety of means. Links to reports, send the reports via e-mail, only send reports with data the user can see, and send alerts when reports fail are just a few of the common things that can be done.

When it comes to ease of use, Business Objects is a lot more intuitive and straight forward. Cognos seems to make you take a lot more steps to get the same results. Some of those steps are tough to figure out. The term "clunky" comes to mind when I think of working in Cognos.

Both products offer very similar concepts and tools to summarize and chart the data in a report.

Licensing costs and how you want to architect your server infrastructure are going to be the key driver to which product fits your organization better. Business Objects offers the advantage of another more static reporting tool with Crystal Reports.

Human Resources Management (HRM) plays an essential role in developing a company's strategy as well as handling the employee-centered activities and the strategic management of the employees, who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of the strategic objectives of the
organization.

IBM Cognos is a flexible, database-driven Human Resources Management, forecasting and project planning tool, which is fully integrated with all core IBM Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) modules - replacing the use of multiple, diverse, unlinked spreadsheets.

Cognos provides invaluable support for all participants in the HR and project planning cycles, of even the largest, most complex or fast-changing businesses. It supports a rich Web enabled planning and modeling framework that supports driver based planning to help connect HR assumptions to operational outcomes.

I’ve used Cognos for more than 10 years, from multiple global locations and platforms and it has allowed me to bring together information from across the organization and key systems to provide a "single version of the truth", from which to plan and make decisions. For example, it:

• Provides the core platform services of centerpiece capabilities (Talent Profiles, Employee Records, Competencies, Job Profiles, and Reports) enables planning departments to create forecasts and perform "what-if" analysis

• With Cognos’s combination of self-service facilities (allowing access from disparate locations) and workflow (to tightly control the data flow into the budgeting process), you can easily move from centralized to devolved project planning.

Cognos automatically generates supporting transactions that contains all employee records, giving you easy access to the information you need to reduce errors, enforce policies consistently, and build your business, to support more complete day-to-day operational reporting. So, for instance, a management entry may trigger an automatic compensation entry, which gives rise to changes in the employee's future compensation and reward decisions.

Cognos can integrate data: from existing spreadsheets (thanks to dynamic links into Excel); from external programs; or from end users (via user-defined, web-based input screens). This enables several business divisions or data sources to contribute to the planning and forecasting process, while keeping track of the changes and control over all the data inputs.

Sharing core ERP system administration and security infrastructure ensures that Cognos user permissions, audit controls, validation and security features are tightly managed and consistent throughout.

• Controlled user access, even when data is entered via Excel, to ensure accuracy and security of the underlying database. Complete audit trail for all data changes, user name and time of the change.

• Ultimately, IBM’s Cognos Enterprise offers a unique architecture, which delivers true "Post- Implementation Agility", allows changes to your system long after initial installation - in response to changing requirements, and without depending on expensive external consultants or constrained IT resources. This makes Cognos the ideal choice for service-based organizations that are affected by frequent and dynamic business change.

Underpinned by IBM technology, Cognos is the only planning tool that can efficiently adapt to major business change without re-implementation. You can start with native integrations from HR Management to other core talent management processes in order to support a holistic, end-to-end cloud talent management strategy.

IBM Cognos Enterprise Software offers customers the industry’s most flexible delivery and deployment options, including IBM smarter cloud solutions.