Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

Reporting

• A single, adaptive authoring environment for the full range of reports.
• Create managed business reports, production reports, dashboards, and ad hoc queries.
• Report against all operational systems, OLAP, and relational data sources.
• Publish reports in all desired formats: Email, HTML, PDF, Microsoft Excel, CSV, and XML.
• Offload IT effort and reduce reporting backlog through drag-and-drop formatting and user self-service.
• Support for Unicode addresses multilingual reporting needs.
• Proven scalability to hundreds of thousands of users.

Analysis

• Explore and analyse large volumes of data with fast and predictable response times.
• Analyse all data, using OLAP or dimensionally aware relational sources.
• Perform deep comparative analysis of business performance across multiple dimensions (time, product, customer, etc.).
• Analyse large, complex data sets with an easy-to-use, drag-and drop user interface, pivoting, and filtering.

Scorecarding

• Link initiatives to strategy with metrics and strategy maps.
• At-a-glance view of performance against targets.
• Ensure accountability by linking metrics to owners.
• Understand performance trends with direct access to reports and analysis.
• Out-of-the-box initiative tracking to manage corrective actions.
• Use metric data to drive your enterprise planning for integrated performance management.

Dashboards

• Deliver information from different sources in a single visual report.
• Provide an at-a-glance snapshot of business performance.
• Shorten time to decisions with multi-object performance reports, maps, charts, scorecards, lists, and interactive OLAP analysis.
• Create personalized information centres to monitor performance.
• Connect dashboard elements with underlying data for further reporting and analysis.
• Support management methodologies such as Six Sigma.

Business event management

• Automate the detection and management of important business events.
• Monitor operational systems to detect business process events.
• Set alerts and deliver time-critical information to decision-makers across departments and locations.
• Reduce time-to-action and enable fact-based issue resolution.
• Manage events throughout their lifecycle until they are resolved.

Data integration

• With extract, transform, and load (ETL) capability, deliver a data warehouse ready for analysis and reporting.
• Built on a dimensional framework to provide information based on the way business users think.
• Optimised for Cognos 8 BI capabilities.
• Lets you leverage and enhance your investments in third-party tools.

Work with information your way

Cognos 8 BI supplies the complete range of information and capabilities you need to support your decisions and guide your workday.

• Stay connected: Use managed reports, scorecards, dashboards, and alerts.
• Find the answers: Build reports and queries to address your questions.
• Explore trends: Perform in-depth, comparative analysis.

Business intelligence that fits your role

• Information you need: Depending on your job, you may need regular reports, vital signs at-a-glance, up-to-date reports, or the ability to dive more deeply into information. Use information the way you want.
• Presented for you: Get the portal and UI that fits your needs, rather than a generic one for highly technical users.
• Better collaboration: Everyone using the same system and common data increases collaboration across roles and functions.
• Complete access to your data: Connect systems such as operations, resources, customers, and finance to deliver a common business view of your data and answer all your questions.
• Data consistency: Gain a single business view of your corporate data. Be confident that you and your colleagues are working with the same numbers.
• Reduce your time to action: Unite your corporate data, so departments, divisions, and business units can easily share information from different sources. Spend less time gathering information or reconciling incompatible data.