IBM Cognos Room for Improvement

Carlos Larrad Salgado - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality.

The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

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SalmanAhmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of ERP Applications at Patel Hospital

Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic.

IBM should provide more support for Cognos development. It is quite limited in Pakistan.

In the next release, I would like to have a mobile app for Cognos. For instance, Power BI has a mobile app for their solution, and I would like Cognos to do the same.

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Mahmoud SAmi - PeerSpot reviewer
Data & AI Solution Arch. at Alkan CIT Ethiopia

Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product.

The UI of the product needs to be similar to the one offered by Power BI, which has the most market share presently.

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Buyer's Guide
IBM Cognos
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM Cognos. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Paulius Bistrickis - PeerSpot reviewer
CFO at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We started working with Power BI, which we feel will be number one in a couple of years. Even though it still has some improvement, it's a promising tool. All BI tools have similar issues to IBM Cognos.

Regarding additional features, it would be good if the solution had conditional formatting similar to Excel, where you can conditionally format based on colour. For example, colour scales like green, yellow, and red make it easier to categorize tables, rows or columns by colour. Unfortunately, this feature does not exist in any BI tool.

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JB
Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Architect

IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement.

In order for IBM Cognos to survive, they need to keep up with dashboarding. I know they're becoming more agile as far as being able to move away from a framework manager and use modules, which is great in order to build the models. They need to be able to compete with Microsoft B because Microsoft BI has beaten them up as far as reporting and dashboarding. They need to improve to better compete with other solutions.

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SusheelA - PeerSpot reviewer
Director - Metrics & Analytics with 5,001-10,000 employees

The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help.

In the next release of the solution, It would be a great addition to the analytical tool pack if there were histograms on the fly it would be a benefit. I know there is a workaround on IBM Cognos and I've used that workaround to develop the histograms, but not everyone is that tech-savvy. It would be a great help if we had some of these features, such as histogram, box plots, on the fly.

Lastly, the solution could improve by adding some of the user-friendly statistical calculations, such as percentile calculations, median, mode, for calculations.

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PP
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

As we get new requirements, we need to see if they fit into Cognos. As of right now, it fits our needs, however, that can change.

We've had issues in the past that the solution is still working to resolve.

The solution seems to slow down the servers. We're working with IBM to see if this can be resolved. 

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JB
Cognos BI Developer at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.
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WY
Data Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool.

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LF
Resp offre IBM Cognos, Lyon at Talan

The solution's support needs improvement. Also, they should add better administrative tools.

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LZ
Managing Consultant at Adaptive USA

One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics. This is something IBM has recognized and addressed in order to more effectively compete against other leading visualization products like Qlik Sense and Tableau. They have made major improvements in their latest release of the Cognos v11 platform also known as “Cognos Analytics”. This version of the product has been redesigned with a more intuitive interface and offers complete guided and business self-service capabilities designed to quickly identify and gain insights from your data.

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SD
Sr. Data Warehouse Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

In terms of what could be improved with this product, the speed could be better.

The second thing I feel is lacking in Cognos 11 is usability - ease of use. I find Tableau much easier to use.

I have not used stories and dashboards extensively, but I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients.

The other thing that should be included in Cognos is Landing Pages. It would be good for the Dashboard Landing Page, if they could make it as easily and attractively as Tableau, that's the only other tool I've used, and theirs is completely visually appealing. The client should want to click and open the Cognos portal to get their data. We have our own product and Cognos is integrated with it. If they're able to get similar data, even if it is not as detailed in our product, they don't have any motivation to go to Cognos. They need to polish their product a little bit to make it more user-friendly and customizable - that would help.

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FS
RPA Architect & RPA Product Owner at Francisco Sosa

The online documentation is good, but it could be better. If the documentation could provide more examples, it would be nice.

It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users.

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AS
DWH/Cognos Project Lead at Syntel Inc @ Mercedes Benz USA

- Need improvement towards Visualization.

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it_user123936 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Programmer Analyst at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

At the moment ,the metadata tool (Framework Manager) is client based, meaning, you have to install the tool itself in a workstation. You will also need any ODBC/OLDB and database drivers installed on that computer to access data and start modeling. This tool design and the way it works is already outdated. Your models can get corrupted for numerous reasons; that's why it is always good to back up and save your work. The tool does NOT support multi-user development, meaning only one developer per model is allow at any given time. You also rely on the file system all the time. A cloud-based / multi-user solution would be more than welcome.

IBM Cognos and the entire suite does NOT come with any source/version control capabilities out of the box. If you made a change to a report and, for whatever reason, you want to go back to the previous iteration, you will need to restore a backup or an export; if you didn't make a backup, you will be out of luck. Same with every single object in the environment (packages, queries, security, administration, settings, etc).

They also need to take more advantage of new in-memory technology, and have better integration with other visualization tools.

It would be nice if we could use standard XML as a data source.

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KARTHIKEYAN THANGARASU - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Administrator at American Savings Bank

We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required.

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PN
Founder, Owner and CEO at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think IBM Cognos BI solution needs improvements in:

1) chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't.

2) data source connections: many other competitors support connections to cloud and innovative data sources (Google Analytics, Facebook, Microsoft Azure, MongoDb, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SharePoint and so on), that IBM Cognos BI cannot connect to.

3) maps: IBM Cognos BI have only 35 predefined maps. If you need a map of a particular area, you need to buy it (in MapInfo or Esri formats) and convert it in Cognos format, and this is pretty a long way. Furthermore, it's very inconvenient to use Google Maps maps, since this kind of integration is not native.

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SA
Director - Metrics & Analytics at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Overall, there aren't any features that are lacking in the product.

The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution.

I'd like to see more predictive analytics enhancements in future releases.

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WF
‎Manager BI Manufacturing at a paper AND forest products with 10,001+ employees

We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics.

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it_user551517 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Cognos BI Developer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

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).

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it_user504054 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Intelligence Consultant at Aspen Associates

We are excited about more features for cloud and web analytics:
- Cloud: Companies are really starting to embrace the cloud for running their business intelligence software. There is so much to choose from for supporting and servicing cloud users than 1-2 years ago.
- Web analytics: For me, this is where you see who is searching for your products and services. You can find out where in the country/world and know more about the user too. This gives you insight on your web presence and how your social media and marketing campaigns are performing. Also, who’s talking about your products and services and why? You can see what the issues are and what you are doing well.

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Hardik  Parashar - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Data Engineer at Digit Insurance

I don't manage much in the backend, however, we see a lot of issues in Cognos in terms of storage as well as a lot of failures on a daily basis. 

There are separate people managing all these things. It's my understanding that these issues are very frequent. There are some gaps in Cognos. For example, our data volume is huge. Whenever our users try to download reports, the main user used to avoid data extraction requests so that users could actually go into Cognos and download the reports. When it comes to the size, long reports take a lot of time and the performance is not that so good. Finance or marketing reports, for example, are longer and take longer to download. 

When it comes to analytics, we'd like to see some manual data capabilities. 

The scalability could be better.

They should provide improved visual reporting. 

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PZ
Director at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

In IBM Cognos it always takes too long to build enterprise reporting, but I don't think that making another product can be solved.

Tableau and PowerBI is a tool, but enterprise reporting is a platform where you put all kinds of information together.

I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page.

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PC
Associate at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos.

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it_user79140 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Business Intelligence at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

I think that IBM has done a great job with regularly improving this product and keeping up with the competing products. A couple of areas of improvement could be made in alerts for the application monitoring. It is hard to set up alerts when a servicer becomes unresponsive. The other improvement would be in improving the audit capabilities (including the database) of the application. The audit database is somewhat complex in developing good system usage reports.

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it_user5220 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of IT at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

There is room for improvement in the user interface, which might simply be a learning curve issue. It has changed dramatically and some of the functionality is very different. For example, getting a list of reports requires some extra clicks to get the full list and the entire file name is not visible in all views.

Some important bugs still exist in the product, including:

  • Not being able to change packages on a published report
  • Some issues with Framework Manager in Cognos 11 not connecting properly when the 10.2.2 version is still installed
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it_user509850 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos Consultant at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This is an easy one: visualizations. While being able to use them to provide client-side filtering in Active reports is great, they are so far behind the functionality offered in the basic Cognos charts, it is almost laughable that they even offer them in the product. As the legacy charting has all the functionality I need, I know they can see how far behind the visualizations are, but still have done nothing to improve that part of the product. Filtering client side allows me to offer much more data to the client, but without decent charting it is not very useful.

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RG
Head of Data Architecture at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information. IBM Cognos could be improved with some analytical solutions that could help us make predictions.

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it_user569925 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Cognos Analyst Developer at a engineering company with 10,001+ employees

Every product on the market can be improved, but I would like IBM to stop trying to compete with the smaller players in the market, rushing out versions that nobody wants to migrate to because the version seems unstable.

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it_user514284 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Consultant at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

There is room for improvement with the GUI. The product is a web-based application; it is easy to build basic style. However, at a certain level, it lacks support for advanced web programming capabilities, such as JavaScript, Ajax, etc.

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it_user193824 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business System Analyst at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

More flexibility for joining data sources within reports would be nice. It seems to be a feature IBM is slowly developing.

We have several framework/packages created. For example, we have one for sales, one for shipping, one for manufacturing, etc. You go to create a report in sales, but the one table that you need is defined in the manufacturing package. You can’t join the two packages in Cognos. Someone has to create the table on the sales package in Framework; then, it can be used in the report.

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HB
Director at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers.

It would also be nice to be able to export the dashboard. Some dashboards can be deployed and seen by everyone. But the problem is, I have to go through the Cognos server to define each user. There is no flexibility to do it as a report that can be published as a web report or something like that for many users.

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it_user190104 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Partner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The key areas for improvement are the administrative capabilities that are largely the same from the series 8/10 versions and the ability to use Framework Manager packages and models on new dashboards, etc. The introduction of data sets in the latest version demonstrates that this functionality is going to be offered around the corner.

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HS
Senior Business Analyst - Reporting at Great-West Life

The latest visualization doesn't give much flexibility to the users in terms of what can be changed. For example, there are fixed palettes. The dashboard interface needs tremendous improvement as it's not very fast as compared to Tableau and the likes.

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it_user897015 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

What we have noticed is that it's lacking a few things which we want, especially on the visualization side of things. We want Cognos to improve, IBM to improve. But functionally, it has been working fine.

One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map.

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PM
Senior Cognos Developer at ADP

The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions.

In Cognos version 10.2.1 RAVE visualizations are still coping to become an easy user interface for developing advanced charts compared to Tableau/QlikView (as it is a BI tool) . As of now, only active reports are available. In Cognos version 10.2.2. and 11, the analytics feature seems to be upgraded and on par with other competitive tools in the market.

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JM
Data Warehouse Manager at a construction company with 10,001+ employees
  • The visualization tools have greatly improved but the active reports still need help.
  • The build process of linking the variables can be a bit complex, especially for newbies.
  • The ability to secure on the downloaded dataset that feeds the active report is prohibitive of its widespread use.
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it_user156465 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Business Analytics, Operations at a aerospace/defense firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The tool is complex, and I would not recommend it to small companies, because you need to have expertise for Framework Model development, access rights issues, licensing, etc.

New functions, e.g., external data import, do not work as smoothly as they should. New visualisations using RAVE take a long time.

Unfortunately statistics are not available for Cognos 10.2 (as in 10.1), and that has been a disappointment, when Lean Six Sigma-type calculations are done.

Additionally, even after four years of using Cognos, it is sometimes difficult to understand how the tool works, e.g., which calculations are processed locally, etc.

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it_user148620 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I would like to have the ability to drill down to the lowest level of granularity and still do it with speed. Cognos is unable to get down to the lowest level of grain in our data. The solution slows down to an unreasonable level or completely comes to a halt. So if the lowest level of grain is a single customer order or serial number level amongst millions of data points, we are forced to use other solutions to get at that data.

Also, Cognos has no ability to integrate with other reporting solutions.

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BM
BI Cognos Expert at Pilmark LTD

There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos.

That would be nicer if you'd have more charts, the ability to add charts easily. That would be a big improvement. However, the maps have been improved immensely which I am happy with.

Once you put a few requests into IBM for changes, it might take six to 12 months. A lot of the requests are responded to and they upgrade or change the feature. When you make a report and you plan it in advance and you want to have smart dates in your planning, this is a bit limited. It is a small issue and you can work around it quite easily but it would be something they can improve.

If you want to see the new feature in someone else's product it takes time, and for IBM Cognos it is approximately six to 12 months for it to be implemented. The other cloud competitors will have it. 

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it_user551511 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead, BI and Analytics at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see the following improvements:

  • Tools: Dashboards, visualizations, and the simplification of the available tools
  • Licensing: It is very difficult to know which studio needs to be passed to which users or projects. This is because licensing and tools are confusing and they overlap with one another. Even for OLAP, there are issues with transformers, TM1, dynamic cubes, and compatibility with other vendors’ cubes.
  • Simplicity: There are CQM and DQM modes, so it can become very technical.
  • Consistency: They made a decision to deprecate Query Studio and migrate to Workspace Advanced. However, that did not happen. They wanted to push the new version which will deprecate Workspace Advanced as well.

Basically, Cognos has been a traditional BI platform. Lately, there has been a trending push for more of a modern BI approach that is heavier on the self service side. This approach does not care for the whole cycle of waiting on a request to go through the IT development chain in order to make it happen for the end user.

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it_user502383 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Right now, we are in the midst of implementing a brand new version of Cognos, named Cognos Analytics. This version is very, very different from prior versions. We are finding ‘undocumented features’ on a daily basis and reporting issues to IBM. We are working thru the issues, but it is very stressful on us, finding out functionality that was in the previous release but is missing now in Cognos Analytics version 11.

Here are just a few examples of issues that we are facing as of today! We have identified other issues, which have been resolved or we have workarounds.

- In our CA production environment, we imported reporting content that included saved output of financial reports. The saved output did NOT import and therefore users will not be able to pull up the reports in production! This works in our other CA environments, but failing in production!

When you have a saved output report that contains links to drill thru reports and you want to open them in a new browser window, it fails! You have to go in and modify the reports to open in the same window, so now the user cannot see the original report that they clicked on.

You also lose the ability to export reports to Excel or PDF when you have drill thrus to a new window.

If you run a report, have it emailed out and you attach a link to the report in the email, it fails only in our production environment.

The Search and Select prompt fails on the prompt page.

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it_user550095 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Cognos Developer at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would like them to reduce the cost of the user licenses.

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it_user416913 - PeerSpot reviewer
Group Reporting Manager at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Accessibility to and flexibility of consolidation rules / logic: Products like HFM are much easier to work with when one needs to change rules, etc. With Cognos, I find that a regular user needs a much better understanding of the control tables and the E rules than a regular HFM user needs of the rules file. There seem to be more steps involved in Cognos, and the order of those steps are also important. One almost has to tick a few dozen boxes in a particular sequence whereas with HFM, one just has to export the rules and do a Ctrl + Find.

The investment register is also quite painful to work with, but I suspect that's due to configuration issues.

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it_user503625 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Manager at Mspark

The visualizations are nothing flashy, but they can be customized (with some extra work). I think the new version might help a bit with this. Report authoring can be a bit overwhelming for new users, but the new version helps with this as well.

Our company is currently on version 10.2.2, but there is a new version available called Cognos Analytics (aka version 11). We are in the early stages of upgrading to Cognos Analytics. The newer version has an updated interface that looks and feels much more modern. Charts, graphs and other visualizations are fairly basic in both versions, but you can create custom visualizations using JSON thanks to the Cognos Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE). I believe Cognos Analytics makes it a bit easier to create and customize RAVE visualizations, but I can’t confirm that because I have not tried it.

In version 10.2.2, Report Studio (used for authoring complex reports) can be a bit overwhelming for new users because of all of the buttons and options available. Cognos Analytics still has all of the buttons and options, but the interface is smarter and more streamlined. You’ll only see relevant options for the part of the report you are developing.

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MM
Lead Technical Consultant at Perficient

There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data. In the next release, Cognos should include artificial intelligence features.

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PD
Principal Co-founder at Enterprise BIDI Solutions

The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved. The way they have designed the framework, the framework manager is a critical part. If you have a properly-designed framework manager then whatever stories you generate through the Report Studio or Query Studio will give you better results. However, if the modeling is incorrect then it will kill your free memory and detract from the performance.

You have to have complete control of the data model, including the hierarchy and the relationships. There are still a lot of loose ends. The way that a many-to-many relationship can be defined within the framework should be brought into the Report Studio and Query Studio. This would be an improvement. 

There can be a recursive effect, where you are pulling resources away from the users. This will eat away the resources and cause them a lot of lag time in their reporting.

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it_user831210 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant
  • Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool.
  • Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures (also being aggregate aware).
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it_user504744 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos Consultant at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The GUI for reporting isn’t very user friendly, so beginners struggle with feeling overwhelmed when seeing it for the first few times. I spent my first two years just getting used to where everything was and how to script simple things without looking them up. A better dictionary of examples for functions would have gone a long way with helping me.

They’ve improved it and it’s much better than it was, as well as the tooltips on the page, so I’m thinking they had similar feedback in the past. When I engage new clients on the product, though, they are almost always overwhelmed by the interface and I don’t have a good solution other than redesign. They could create a secondary Page Design pane that is simpler for beginners. They could even merge Query Studio with Report Studio, and as you familiarize yourself with the Query pane and need a little more functionality, you can flip to the Report Studio pane. I would prefer a secondary pane option over an entire redesign since I’m familiar with the current structure.

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it_user139509 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The Cognos Suite needs improvement in a number of areas. First, the products must be made more user friendly for casual users. Next, business users need the ability to quickly pull in data from non-structured sources without the need for IT to model the data. Another area for improvement is advanced charting and graphical elements that you can use in reports and dashboards.

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Ahmed Ashmawy - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Practice Lead at Hyve Technology Consulting

The solution could have more options for themes in terms of creating reports. Also, its drill-down feature needs improvement. In addition, they should include features for visualization in the next release.

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EL
Owner at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

The version I last worked on "IBM Analytics" required you to build your own queries and reports for statistical reasons, which should be out of the box rather than requiring users to build them. A nice dashboard showing uptime, runtime per report/user/ query ... usage per report ... for direct publication would be nice to promote the tool at the end users without investing a lot of time in it as an administrator

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MK
Consultant at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos.

It is also quite pricey.

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HP
Senior Technical Coordinator - IM and BI at a healthcare company with 11-50 employees

So far we do not have any issues with the functionality. The cost per year could be improved. They are the leader in the industry and they charge a lot. If you are the end-user and you want to work with the leader you cannot complain about the cost and you have to pay for it.  

If they were going to make improvements, I would say that they could do more related to big data. I think they were lacking in the initial phases of development in this area. I am not sure if they may have addressed these concerns already because I have not seen their new capabilities in more recent releases. But initially, it was lacking strength in the area of big data.  

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it_user534747 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos - BI Consultant / Tech Lead at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see more robust scheduling capabilities. Advanced audit information should be readily available, rather than pointing us to use a SDK each time.

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it_user453288 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Leader at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Even though I identified Event Studio as one of the most valuable features, it still has room for improvement. Sometimes events get stuck; we need to restart Cognos services and do clean up in order to clear the queue. Error messages are not that straightforward.

The other area that needs improvement is Cognos Workspace. When we add multiple reports to the workspace, the performance is not up to the mark.

Another area of improvement is ‘interactivity’. Cognos is not even comparable from the interactivity perspective with other reporting tools such as Tableau.

View full review »
it_user5220 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of IT at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Replacement for VVM is still giving us issues. Trying to connect to SAP Function Modules is tricky. View full review »
PZ
Director at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Continue to develop the AI assistant so we can add business logic to the metadata. 
  • Ability to insert own graphs in D3 through supported API. 
  • Prompting should be better.
View full review »
it_user835635 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager Information Communication Technology with 501-1,000 employees

I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like. 

View full review »
Carlos Mardinotto Junior - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Cognos can improve in some data base basic connections (should be easier) mainly migrations in version 7.x to 8.x 10.x

View full review »
it_user73401 - PeerSpot reviewer
MIS & Development Manager at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

The upgrade process is always a challenge, as it is basically a reinstall each time.

View full review »
it_user86397 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It definitely needs better data visualization. I needed to couple Cognos with Tableau to provide a complete reporting environment. View full review »
it_user80244 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Analytics at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
The reporting tool can be tricky and you'll need to get used to it but it's worth the effort. View full review »
it_user547329 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos Developer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Performance and visualizations are aspects which need to be improved. Cognos doesn't have all the charts that are available in the other tools such as Tableau, Spotfire etc. Cognos is trying to keep up with the others and Cognos version 11 has a lot of new charts but still it has a lot of room for improvement.

Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode). I think these are the two main reasons why a lot of companies are using Tableau/OBI/ Spotfire even when they have Cognos.

View full review »
it_user538227 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Reporting Engineer (Contracter) with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
RE
Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

IBM has stated that Cognos Analytics 11 will include RAVE2/D3 charting support by the end of the year. I am using v11.0.4 and it is not included. V11.0.4 is the latest release TMK.

IBM has stated that Cognos Analytics 11 will include a mapping engine (like esri) by the end of the year. I am using v11.0.4 and it is not included. V11.0.4 is the latest release TMK.

I ported a complex dashboard built in Report Studio v10.2.2 into the v11.0.04 environment. After the embedded HTML items were removed so that Full Interactive Mode could be used, and replacing that HTML functionality with external JavaScript (via Custom Controls), the same report runs slightly slower. Also, after spending a day working in the editor on a report, the UI gets slower and slower. I either have to log off close the browser, then open a new browser and log on again to restore the start of day performance, or restart the BI service to achieve the same result. I was using Firefox 49. I’m now on 45 ESR but haven’t don’t enough work yet to see if this makes a difference.

I have hidden objects (block type “none”) on the page. To edit these I need to set the “show hidden objects” on in the options. This setting sometimes sticks between editing sessions, sometimes not. I opened two separate browsers and open a different version of the same report in each. In one the hidden objects displayed, in the other they didn’t.

View full review »
it_user544590 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos BI Architect/ Developer at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It would be more user friendly with GUI navigation. A lot of expertise is required to be able to navigate and perform simple tasks, as well as to create reports with Cognos TM1. I believe a GUI will make it easier for less technical folks (non-power users) to be able to use the tool effectively.

View full review »
it_user98526 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant IT at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Administration and security.

View full review »
DA
Advisor at DCM infotech

The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved.

View full review »
it_user504741 - PeerSpot reviewer
IBM Cognos Instructor and Consultant at a tech company with 51-200 employees

The one that sticks out in my mind is the ability to search the relational data tree for query items (fields). I believe this functionality has been added in v11 (Cognos Analytics). The user interface in v10 is a little dated and not as tablet-friendly as some of the other viz tools. This has been greatly improved in v11.

View full review »
it_user165297 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Dashboards are slow compared to other tools currently on the market. Visualizations are improving, but still difficult to get just right. The default mapping solution included is only useful for the most basic requirements.

View full review »
it_user561699 - PeerSpot reviewer
Database application specialist at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Data Manager, InfoSphere, and Framework manager can be a little more user-friendly. But we are able to manage and learn from it. We can create data sources in order for the other data tools to function.

I would like to see a more user-friendly interface. Sometimes it can be confusing to navigate through it.

View full review »
it_user560289 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos Consultant (Contract) at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user544740 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Intelligence consultant, freelance at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

The Cognos BI suite is missing a user-friendly tool/functionality that makes it possible for regular BI users (not report developers) to make personalized reports. Generally, Cognos is not easy to use for non-experienced BI users who need to make their own reports.

View full review »
it_user86730 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Development Manager - Innovation - ERP Protheus with 1,001-5,000 employees

The new version’s web interface isn't easy to use by 'regular' users. You must have technical skills to build reports. The product is not like QlikView or Tableau, where 'regular' users can build their reports on their own.

View full review »
it_user171960 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager - Technology at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

Framework Manager, Map Manager, and Reporting Database Connectivity features should all be free.

View full review »
BM
BI Cognos Expert at Pilmark LTD

In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful.

I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring.

View full review »
it_user267465 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • The Cognos Data Manager is very datamart/Kimball oriented, and it should be made more flexible, so that it can be used for architectures like Inmon’s or a data vault.
  • Some of its components are not very stable (for instance the lookups).
  • The prescribed working order (dimensions and hierarchies, then fact-tables) makes implementing design adaptations a complex and risky operation: loosen one thread, and a lot more go with it, and this should me made more flexible.
View full review »
it_user505704 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant - Analytics at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Dashboarding: Actually right now in Cognos 10.2.2, Cognos Workspace is the dashboarding studio to build dashboards. But I believe some work still needs to be done in order to compete with other tools like Tableau, etc.

Tableau has in-memory capabilities and a lot of depth in visualizations. It can analyze and display a lot of intuitive data quicker. Also, Cognos Dashboard requires more IT skill to create and maintain as compared to Tableau. However, the new version, Cognos 11, is a big step in that direction to make it more user friendly.

Dimensional Modeling Reporting: Dimensional Modeling is used for reporting where the reports can be drilled down to a detail level. It works on the same concept as cubes, except it is live. Performance is a big factor, so it requires lot of expertise to build the right kind of model with the proper aggregation level; otherwise, the performance is impacted. Plus, it requires MDX knowledge to enhance/maintain the model, because SQL doesn’t work in dimensional modeling.

View full review »
it_user561858 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Cognos Developer II at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • 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
View full review »
it_user34830 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Specialist at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user142380 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Partner, Lead Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

Self-service analysis features have improved a lot, even with new subversions of version 10, but I feel business users can't really utilize these features as they are not too intuitive and they easily find themselves lost among Cognos Studios. Query Studio is easy to use, but you can easily reach its limits. Analysis Studio is for OLAP analysis and it's quite easy to use, but OLAP needs a predefined multi-dimensional data source. Report Studio has lots of power, but it's too complex for a business analyst to use. Cognos Workspace aims to provide some self-service capabilities, but it's good for dashboarding only. Cognos Insight has been designed to close this gap, but it's quite a new solution; therefore, it lacks some complex analysis features.

Another area for improvement is error messaging. When an error occurs, the user has two options: the user gets a message that an error occurred, logged and please contact the admin, OR you get a long Java exception that you don't understand if you are not both a Java developer and a Cognos architecture expert (so there is a big chance that you will never know why the error happened).

View full review »
it_user507990 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos & OBIEE Business Intelligence Consultant at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees

There is room for improvement regarding installation of the visualization plugin for Cognos reports to enhance the colours of your dashboards. There are plugin charts from IBM for Cognos to incorporate Web 2.0 colors into charts and also add some animation. For example, feed-in and feed-out animation to add some action to the report when you open it for first time or when you refresh the report page.

View full review »
it_user286518 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Strategist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

As there are new releases every 3 months or so, enhancements to the new dashboards are regular being released. It would be useful though to be able to apply custom palettes, and change the spacing around each object, allowing dashboard objects to fit more snugly with each other.


View full review »
it_user267465 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The stability of the lookups is not very good, and really needs improvement. The tool forces you in the direction of a datamart/Kimball architecture. If that is not the architecture that you want, it requires a lot of tricks to fold it to your needs. When you use hierarchies and dimensions, you are basically more or less forced into building these first, before building the fact tables. If these dimensions need adjustment or modifications, implementing these is a very complicated delicate and a faultridden operation.

View full review »
it_user250983 - PeerSpot reviewer
Bi Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The main improvement required is to help users with the full vision about the product according to their need. Also, the scale of the stuff on their website that is hidden needs to be changed. They also a need technical person who is very interested in the product, and understands it. The technical stuff is improving too fast, and the IBM lab is working too hard.

View full review »
it_user1077768 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Warehouse Consultant at CHRIST Jueweliere und Uhrmacher seit 1863 GmbH

This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how.

View full review »
it_user168417 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Consultant at a university with 501-1,000 employees

I find areas where some improvements will help are:

  • When the data becomes very voluminous, then handling and representing it becomes clumsy.
  • The type of charts are only two dimensional. Currently, the charts are two dimensional to understand the trend. Also, one needs to compare the time horizon or the volume horizon separately and it will be really helpful, if that dimension could be included.
  • The reporting output/UI is quite old-fashioned.
  • The statistical insights are missing or they cant be created.
View full review »
it_user552825 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analytics Specialist at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It is struggling to compete with the front-end ease of use and visual appeal of QlikView and Tableau.

View full review »
it_user221220 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst in XBRL Projects at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Cognos is a good product with bad performance. We had licenses for all the features but users almost exclusively used the molap cube file.

View full review »
AA
BI Architect/Cognos Solution Architect/ETL Design Architect at a media company with 201-500 employees

There are a number of things, but I would start with just a few...

Framework Manager:

  1. Query subjects sorting in a model are absent.
  2. DMR model in FM is currently decommissioned, but basically needed.
  3. Cubes – requires my time to explain, but cannot work properly with a big dimensions.
View full review »
it_user689556 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

As with all products, I have run into bugs; some severe enough to derail the project until IBM provided a patch. IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner. Fortunately, show-stopping bugs are few and far between.

View full review »
it_user555990 - PeerSpot reviewer
IBM Cognos Consultant at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

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!

View full review »
it_user507993 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analytics Coach at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

IBM Cognos Analytics continues to improve with every release. On the horizon are some major enhancements that include:

  • World-class mapping capabilities (This is now available with release 5. IBM partnered with Mapbox and now offer beautiful geospatial mapping capabilities)
  • Connections to more data sources (with release this is greatly imporved.
  • Storytelling features like Watson Analytics (available with release 4)
  • Connections to Frame Work Manager packages for dashboards (available with release 5)
View full review »
it_user174678 - PeerSpot reviewer
Corporate BI Developer with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • -Pulling images directly from database with Report Studio
  • Graceful ways to consume / report on XML or JSON structure received as a result of API call
  • Timely bug fixes
View full review »
it_user5472 - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of IT at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Need to integrate Data Discovery capabilities View full review »
AA
Financial Performance Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

The charts and graphics are very weak. You can find some dashboards, but it is very rigid. It is not as fancy as what you find in another solution, like Microsoft BI.

View full review »
it_user551508 - PeerSpot reviewer
Continuous Auditing Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

In the report studio, the basic functionality requires more development.

View full review »
it_user259185 - PeerSpot reviewer
Prinicipal Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Data discovery-related features
  • Visualizations
  • Speed of interaction with end-user

There are no problems with these areas. IBM Cognos has been working on them, but they are not yet on par with other vendors who are leaders in data discovery. For example, features like Lasso, dynamic pivoting, etc. are not yet available.

View full review »
RE
Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
  • More graphic options
  • Its UI needs to be more 21st century
View full review »
it_user84468 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant

It takes a very long time to learn the product. It requires specialization for different functions. It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it.

View full review »
it_user549354 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cognos Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

This product needs to be improvised by:

  • Clearly pointing out the issues/errors in the description to simplify the debugging process.
  • Enabling more GUI based functionality so that creation of dynamic report and dashboards by using Excel/flat file data is easier.
View full review »
it_user185781 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect with 51-200 employees
  • Ability to easily manage source code and environment deployment
  • Pricing model is frequently changing and hard to manage
  • Maintenance fees were based on a percentage of the base cost, not the discounted price we paid which was a surprise the first year
View full review »
it_user73137 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Basically, our support to enhancement was our corporate team. Where the Oracle Quality module has more flexibility to develop internal tables to gather data. The Cognos BI team doesn’t have this dynamic approach to do the enhancements. So, Corporate decided to replace this application with Oracle OBIEE. View full review »
it_user5319 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Visualization is not as good as some others. View full review »
it_user560208 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Technology Associate Consultant at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would like to see improvements in mobile reporting. When it comes to mobile/offline based reporting, Cognos is not really capable of handling medium to heavy data volume.

The above limitation has been hampering its penetration into health care and other industries which are heavily dependent upon mobile devices for day-to-day operations.

View full review »
it_user505671 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant - IBM SPM Cognos Solution Specialist at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
  • DBMS scalability
  • Debugging
  • UX for admins who are developing on the software
View full review »
it_user217470 - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner, CTO, CBIP, BI Solutions Arhitect with 11-50 employees

The Cognos Analysis Studio and Cognos Query Studio user interface has room for improvement in the area of user experience. Some of the functions are hard to find and complicated to use, but we're talking about advanced functions rarely used.

View full review »
it_user176946 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Architect at a wellness & fitness company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Adding workflow functions to the reports could close the PDCA cycle
  • Speed of report-execution.
View full review »
it_user5601 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees
Complex to learn and use. Need technical team to build solutions. View full review »
it_user823539 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Director with 1-10 employees

It should be more user-friendly. 

View full review »
it_user552831 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Specialist / Information - Business Analyst / Cognos BI Specialist at a local government with 1,001-5,000 employees

For the current dashboard, it would be nice to have a better layout and more functions.

View full review »
it_user544752 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user8061 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analytics Cognos Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Report authoring is sometimes difficult for authors without specific computer knowledge with regard to concepts related to database, i.e., join, union, etc.

View full review »
it_user191655 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI (Cognos) Developer at a pharma/biotech company with 501-1,000 employees

Auditing the SQL to determine if there are any particularly slow points. Also allowing jobs to send email notification when complete with links to all the reports within the email.

View full review »
it_user164019 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Analyst at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Versatility, Performance (speed)

View full review »
it_user505653 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

ETL features have room for improvement.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
IBM Cognos
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about IBM Cognos. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.