IBM Cognos Reviews

Various studios vary in the level of control they give you in putting together a report. As an example, I spend most of my development time in Report Studio. I have always been impressed by the level of control I have in how my reports look, behave, and allow interaction.

• Allowed the organizations I've worked for to standardize the information they deliver to hundreds of decision makers.
• Allowed insight into the operations and trends of the business with speed and accuracy.
• The toolset allows you to create a framework to deliver a range of BI solutions. These scale from high level strategic dashboards with key performance indicators to tactical and operational reporting for the day-to-day running of business activities.

Metadata documentation could be improved. While IBM Cognos tools allow you to document most aspects of the metadata layer, the way this information is stored and exposed for metadata management is too basic.

I have been using IBM Cognos for 17 years.

I have had no issues at all with stability. Cognos is one of the most robust products out there.

There are no issues with scaling this product to a large number of users. The technical architecture is such that scaling is handled easily.

Most technical support issues that I had were revolved in a prompt manner. The amount of information on the IBM knowledge base is impressive. The user community online is full of some brilliant ideas and solutions that I have used many times.

Most companies that I have consulted for had IBM Cognos in place for several years.

A lot of companies that I've worked with outsource the set up activity to IBM or a second-tier consulting firm.

In every case, it has proven to be a wise move. I've never seen the choice of machines or configurations become an issue later down the track.

My advice is to outsource what you are not in the business of doing every day.

Do your homework on the licensing that you require. The penalties and costs involved if you are audited for licensing can be expensive.

IBM does not allow you to trade or swap licenses. Most companies don't allow this either. The definitions of what each license holder is and requires should be clearly understood before entering into any agreements.

Some of their requirements around user licensing for those who were only consumers of reports (e.g., they have output sent to them by email) used to be fairly onerous.

When I've been involved with a software selection, the contenders were BusinessObjects, Cognos, and Oracle. Cognos won due to its broad coverage of features and solutions that it covers as well as the product maturity.

• Resourcing: Don't underestimate the resources required to build good business intelligence reporting and analytics. For example, if you skimp on training, you'll have a great tool set that is going to be used poorly by its user community. Businesses implementing IBM Cognos need to get the balance right in terms of who carries out what activity, especially who and where report authoring takes place. One of the companies I've consulted for gave little training to people in the business outside of IT. As a result, poor quality and slow executing reports were the result.

• Culture: Use these tools to promote the right culture. A lot of the benefit of using IBM Cognos will depend on your organization's maturity level with regards to its use and implementation of these tools and how you integrate their usage into your business processes and decision making. The culture has to be present to allow any BI tool to be successful.

• Ability to produce reporting solutions which are accessible on other devices (iPads, iPhones and Android).
• Ability to distribute interactive reports (Active Reports) to over 1400 recipients. It became too difficult to create reports on a portal page and have people access the portal to download their report, especially on devices like iPads and iPhones. Getting a consensus on the data that these “portal reports” had to display was also difficult for security reasons. The active reports allowed easier access to data (email distribution) and the ability to display more data without security concerns. Each report was tailored to its audience.
• Ability to produce self-service models and utilize self-service tools is a big advantage. I’ve successfully converted report-only data models into dual purpose, reporting, and self-service models without too many headaches. I’ve had success in training managers to use Workspace Advanced to generate their own reports. Some of the less computer savvy users had some difficulty at first.

• Active Reports: More detailed data is available to sales reps and management. The reports are configured for the rep/manager role with a focus on their own territory/market data. The reports are delivered to email, so there is no difficult and lengthy navigation to get the data to the recipient. The ease of use and access meant that more of the audience was utilizing the reports. The amount of inquiries, issues, and complaints was greatly reduced. We received a great response from everyone involved.
• Self Service: The demand for reports was much greater than our resources could provide. Being able to produce self-service models and deliver tools such as Workspace and Workspace Advanced was a huge benefit to my team and to the company as a whole. The fact that we could modify the current models with self-service style packages helped us to provide consistent, dependable solutions without having to “reinvent the wheel”.

When bursting a low volume report using a burst key, I would like the ability to copy myself on the reports. The Carbon Copy (CC) field disappears on the ‘Run with Options’ email option when a burst key is used.

Simple tweaks to some of the tools would increase productivity/development such as the following:

• Ability to control how reports generate queries to the server without having to use custom SQL.
• Ability to make changes to a calculation or column in Workspace Advanced without automatic validation.
• Allowing any object in Workspace Advanced to be moved/deleted. Lists become locked into place once placed on the page.
• Conditional formatting limitations in Report Studio resulted in more report versions for different audiences (Active Reports). We could reduce our 24 report versions down to 8 report versions with a more versatile formatting function.
• Formats are linked to specific data items within a specific query. Queries sharing the same data items should be able to share conditional formats.
• It would be beneficial to have prompts or other (render) variables to control formatting.
• Ability to ‘scroll lock’ in Report Studio: You create a list within a block and set the block to a specific size. The block allows the list to be scrollable within the report. This is useful when the report will be displayed on smaller devices like phones and tablets. When editing the list within this block, after every change is made, the focus returns to the top left of the block. This makes it time consuming to make simple changes to the list and ultimately making it difficult to keep focused on the changes.

We have used Version 10.2.1 for three years.

We encountered some minor issues. With Active Reports, we have a recurring HAL error that is being investigated by IBM at this time. It only affects 0.01% of our 1500+ outputs.

Other reporting tools such as Report Studio (standard reports), Event Studio, Workspace, and Workspace Advanced work well with no issues.

We encountered a scalability issue, but it has been addressed.

With Active Reports, the size of the data and complexity of our model combined with the size of our audience led to an additional month of development.

Ultimately, the Active Reports were generating far more queries than expected when bursting. In some cases, they produced temp space issues. Most of these issues were mitigated through aggregation, indexing, and partitioning.

We were able to streamline the Active Reports in the process which helped to a degree. The biggest gain, from what we understand, will be seen when we are enabling DQM. This is planned for 2017.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Response time tended to be a little slow, but their support team seemed to be very knowledgeable about the tools and best practices.

Some issues were resolved with “quick fixes”, not long term solutions which I didn’t like, but it worked.

Too many questions were answered with “upgrading to 10.2.2 will solve the problem”. This seemed to be IBM’s knee jerk reaction to uncommon, but known issues.

I would award them one point for their upsell tactic, one for their response time, and one for quick fixes versus long term solutions.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

I don't know about the initial setup as I was hired after it. Upgrades seem to take some time and some fine-tuning with IBM's assistance. There has been nothing out of the ordinary.

The standard user licensing is straightforward. It seems like they are expanding these licenses now to cover more of the tools so there is less complexity there. PVU licensing must be researched and understood before committing. The terms of PVU licensing seemed to be a little vague and confusing.

We discovered a great deal more by asking IBM some detailed questions. This will save us some headaches in the future.

We evaluated OBIEE and QlikView to the best of my knowledge.

Cognos provides a multitude of reporting options and I love working with it. I would recommend it as a reporting one-size-fits-all solution. If a simple reporting tool is all that’s required, other solutions might be more suitable.

• Report design
• Very flexible
• Intuitive
• Prompts capabilities, variables, and calculations
• Easy for authors to adapt and elaborate professional dashboards

It includes a dashboard developed for use in all branches across the country. This has improved their time to acquire the proper information to make decisions on a daily basis.

Nowadays, the finance team doesn't use Cognos as they should. They extract a bunch of data and create their spreadsheets all over the place.

With TM1 coming on board next year, this dirty job is going to be replaced by a centralized environment.

I have been using the solution for four years in my current job.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is good.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The setup is a little bit complex with regard to the IT procedures, but the installation is quite easy.

The price is a bit expensive.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

If you have the budget to implement, then do it.

As per the technology itself, it is a very powerful tool with a lot of options depending on the necessities. It is also scalable to the business needs.

IBM Cognos has allowed our company to manage all the data we generate and helped us improve the results.

The product user interface is already being remodeled to fit today's market. There is also room for improvement. IBM is trying to have a more mobile touch. I guess this is OK, if you are using tablets. But if you are using a PC, why should you have a mobile look?

I'm just thinking about a scenario on Microsoft Windows: With Windows 8, everything had the mobile look and feel. Now, with version 10, it has the same look as it always had before version 8, but it improved and I like it!

I have been using this technology for the past three years.

I did not find any stability issues so far.

I did not find any scalability issues so far.

I would give the level of technical support a rating of 9/10. I also think the support that IBM offers is very good. When we have an issue with the software, IBM has good resources to get the issue solved. There is a lot of positive information over the internet.

One thing that can be improved is the time for troubleshooting and finding the root cause of the issues. Sometimes it takes only one day or a week, which is fine. However, sometimes it can take up to one or two months. End-users are not happy when they have to wait this long for a solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You only have to follow the installation wizard screens, indicate where you want to have it installed, and click "Next".

You need to have a good idea of how many people will be using the product. It helps knowing how many of them should have full permission (admins), how many will be developers, and how many will be "just" consumers.

It is a very complete product that keeps getting better and better. It is complex software and you need a good level of expertise.

• Robust framework manager tool for querying
• Retrieving data from disparate sources into one model
• Can be used for creating views and SQL scripts.
• IBM administration for scheduling reports through multiple outputs
• Cognos roles and permissions can be created to give specified access to reports

• We have used this tool to retrieve data from the SQL Server, SSIS packages, and Oracle tables/views.
• We have built the FM model by creating views or query subjects as needed. Different reports can come from one model. This was used for relational and dimensional reports.
• We have created cubes which were built in Cognos transformer and then used as a data source in the model. This was used for creating dimensional reports using Kimball methodology (dimensional and fact tables). The surrogate keys were built by another developer using the IBM data modeler or SQL/Oracle. The dimensional model was used to create robust dashboards using the advanced workspace.
• We have used IBM Cognos Administration to deploy the reports/packages from one environment to another. Drilling through reports was used to go down to granular reports. Reports were given access per their Cognos role or LDAP access. (MS Active Directory was set up by another developer.) Different packages, such as the audit package, can give detailed information about the metadata.
• The entire process can be created in the IBM tool from source, to reporting, to administration.

• Report Studio: While using the dimensional model package, the reporting language could be made more user-friendly.
• Cognos FM could process queries faster
• IBM configuration errors should be detailed, instead of blanket errors
• Deployment of report/packages from one environment to another could be simplified

We have used this solution for more than seven years.

I have not worked on the server side, so I can't comment about stability.

I have no experience with technical support.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

I was not involved in the initial setup process.

I was not involved in the licensing process.

I am not aware of any other evaluated solutions.

The use of the dimensional and relational data model for drill-down, drill-up and drill-through: This is how you can switch between analysis on a high-level, aggregated data and detailed data.

I have been a business intelligence and analytics consultant for 15 years and I have always provided value to my customers.

The improvement to make is for BI to be extended into analytics; more Watson technology in BI. Watson from IBM is for more predictive and prescriptive analysis (big data) and Cognos BI is for more descriptive (BI). When IBM brings the Watson technique into BI, you will have one platform for reporting over past, present and future.

We have been using the solution for 15 years.

We have never encountered any stability issues.

We have never encountered any scalability issues.

Over the last 10 years, I have never needed to use the customer support.

Over these 15 years, I have worked with Oracle BI, Microsoft BI, Qlik and several other tools. Beside Cognos, none were compliant enough with the needs of my customers.

Starting with Cognos wasn't easy before the most recent version 11, Cognos Analytics.

Use one of the best BI tools, which Cognos is.

I have rolled into it by starting BI within Cognos.

First look at what you need, before buying a BI tool and implementing it.

• Metadata modeling: Easy and efficient
• Reporting: Generally quick
• Online report studio: Generally works well

• Automating common reports
• Standardizing metrics and reports utilized through the company
• Enabling efficiency through reducing manual report creation via Excel
• Offline data source use

Data visualization could use improvement as many competitors offer more robust options for charts. More interactivity could be useful here.

The speed in which reports run can also be a large issue unless servers are very well appointed. Queries must be optimized in some cases.

However, overall speed hasn't been a huge issue since Cognos, Version 10.

We have used Cognos in general for eleven years, and this version for over a year.

We encountered some stability issues. Often application servers need to be recycled once a month. Unless report writers are writing very clean queries, database cache cleanups and server recycles are necessary.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10. Usually support is good, but it all depends on the technician you get. I've had great experience with some people, but less than stellar experience with others.

The one thing that has been consistent with IBM Cognos support is if you have a very large issue affecting many users, they are quick to respond and support your issue.

At one company, we switched to SAP BI/BO due to wanting an all-encompassing solution.

The initial setup was not complex. There is great documentation. It has gotten better as Cognos has matured, but some documentation isn't updated as fast as you'd like if you're utilizing one of the latest versions.

I don't have any advice about these issues.

We evaluated Tableau and SAP BI/BO.

Always plan for a scalable implementation that allows for a growing user base. Bump the server memory and processors up as much as you can so you're over and above what is suggested for each version.

Look at the IBM documentation on the server setup and organize the step by step guides for each server in a distributed environment.

Ensure that the security setup and groups are well thought out before starting.

It is an enterprise solution. It provides scalability, reliability, security, and performance for large scale organizations. Without these features, it would become a useless tool for large organizations.

The tool identifies trends and anomalies before it is too late, i.e., before the end-of-the-year results. This prevents customers from getting angry and provides savings opportunities.

For versions 8 and 10, I would like to see better visualizations and geo-mapping.
Version 10 has out-of-the-box charts and maps that are very outdated, look old, and are static (not interactive).

There seems to have been major improvements on visualizations in Cognos Analytics (Version 11).

I have used this solution since 2001, with versions 6.6.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Sometimes technical support can be hit and miss. However, IBM has some very good technicians.

I used a different solution in a prior organization. They switched from Cognos to Business Objects. The decision was made due to the ERP provider (Epic) having some pre-built BI solutions. In order to keep the certification, my organization had to use their reports.

Cognos has come a long way. Fifteen years ago, the installation and setup was very complicated.

It is not difficult nowadays. However, the tune-up is still tricky.

Clearly define the levels of access and user groups to give access to tools and data. It is hard to change once something is in place.