Last update3/27/2012

Partner Essentials Series is not affiliated with the IBM Cognos Public Education or IBM Certification Programs. The Partner Essentials Series course documentation is a collection of information from various sources, including IBM user guides, getting started guides, public education courses, new features guides, readmes, and other materials associated with the software. Much of the course documentation and exercises has been enhanced, simplified, and tested for IBM Global Alliance Partners.

Cognos was acquired by IBM in February 2008 to support IBMs Information On Demand strategy. The combination of Cognos and IBM addresses customers demands for complete solutions, not piece parts, to enable realtime decision-making to people across an organization. What Cognos brings is an exclusive focus on Business Intelligence, Performance Management, and Business Analytics. Pioneered over 18 years ago Global coverage 25,000+ customers in 135+ countries 80% of Fortune 1000 use Cognos Strong channel network: 3,000+ partners

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When decision makers are looking to find answers, they ask questions in three fundamental areas: How are we doing? -- Where are we right now? Why? -- How did we get here? What should we be doing? -- Where are we going? Finding answers to these three questions is relevant in every functional area of an organization in every industry. To answer how are we doing, decision makers have to be able to measure and monitor the business. To dig down and determine Why the situation is what it is, you need Reporting and Analysis capabilities. They give you the ability to look at historic data and understand trends, to look at anomalies, to understand Why? Planning is the lynchpin between the two. Planning takes the understanding of whats going on and sets a forward-looking view of the business, which you measure and monitor against actual performance. Planning answers the question: What should we be doing?

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Very excited to introduce to you the next major milestone on our journey to deliver Business Analytics Cognos 10. The journey from Business Intelligence to Performance Management and now Business Analytics, we have constantly innovated to eliminate boundaries. We have broken down boundaries to deliver business users more power with more ease of use, to deliver broader information sets and yet make that information more relevant, delivered more business flexibility while maintaining IT and finance control, and focused on support of broader user communities than ever before with less burden on IT. With Cognos 10 we begin our next series of innovation to deliver value to all categories and areas of Business Analytics. Innovations that will change how organizations make decisions, allocate resources, predict and plan the future and ultimately determine their competitive advantage.

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Business Intelligence and Performance Management: Empowers decision making and improved business performance through the timely access, analysis and reporting of actionable, accurate, and personalized information. Advanced Analytics and Optimization: Enhances organizational performance by applying advanced mathematical modeling, deep computing, simulation, data analytics and optimization techniques to improve operational efficiency. Enterprise Information Management: Applies the methods, techniques, and technologies that address data architecture, extraction, transformation, movement, storage, integration and governance of enterprise information and master data. Enterprise Content Management: Contains the services, technologies and processes used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver unstructured content. It provides global access and management of digital assets used to collaborate and share information between a company and its customers, suppliers, employees and business partners.

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Architecture of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence The Cognos Platform is designed and built on an open, services-oriented architecture, unlike many BI solutions that simply wrap legacy client-server components from multiple architectures in web services. It was built from the ground up to meet the needs of large-scale enterprise business intelligence deployments. The Cognos Platform underpins Cognos Business Intelligence, delivering all BI capabilities on three distinct tiers: A presentation tier that handles all user interaction in the web Environment An application tier with purpose-built services used to handle all BI processing A data tier that provides access to the widest range of data sources.

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Our rich history of innovation has enabled IBM to deliver the broadest Business Analytics portfolio to help you drive better outcomes. The IBM Business Analytics portfolio has a range of solutions built to uncover insights for specific industries such financial services, public sector, distribution, industrial and communications. As well as deliver insights for cross industry solutions such financial performance, customer relationship, human capital, advanced case management, supply chain and asset optimization. These solutions are built based on our experience working with clients in each of these areas. These solutions leverage a range of rich Business Analytics capabilities from 5 core areas. These categories include -Business Intelligence -Predictive & Advanced Analytics -Financial Performance & Strategy Management -Governance, Risk and Compliance -Analytic Applications. And these solutions and capabilities have been designed to leverage a foundation of trusted information built upon rich data management capabilities and optimized systems from IBM.

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Cognos reporting software provides collaborative features to help business users communicate and drive better decisions: Comments and annotations: Create and save notes on reports that other people can use and reference, making it easier to share information and capture valuable insights. Lotus Connections: Facilitate discussions between users for more insightful decisions through integration with Lotus Connections. Enhanced event management: Assign owners and approval processes for actions or tasks within the BI workflow.

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Using Cognos Business Insight, you can: Build on another persons insights or create your own from scratch. Find relevant content easily. Discover unknown insights by following your own train of thought. Arrange and personalize from your perspective. See all time horizons in a single view for a more complete picture. Personalize your data content quickly and intuitively. Explore and analyze trusted and secure BI data in a familiar spreadsheet format. Develop high frequency and high priority use cases for exploration mode using sanctioned corporate data. Easily share results by promoting Cognos Analysis for Microsoft Excel reports, including new column and row calculations, to standard Cognos reports and dashboards

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Using Cognos Statistics, you can: Develop and distribute reports that include statistical evidence that validates the business information used by consumers to drive key business decisions. Gain deeper insight into the shape and distribution of corporate data to learn more about your customers. Improve processes by determining when data is falling outside specific guidelines or fault levels to help improve processes. Support hypotheses by testing and analyzing your data.

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Cognos Scorecarding enables you to: Communicate strategy -- Using strategy maps and scorecards to visually capture organizational strategy and communicate it throughout your organization, departments and employees understand their goals to help them prioritize and align their projects and daily activities. Understand key relationships -- Using strategy maps and impact diagrams, organizations are able to understand the dynamic cause-and-effect relationships of key processes and metrics. Administrators can create maps and diagrams directly within the application using intuitive wizards and design tools. Users can hover over scorecard impact diagrams and instantly see important metric information, without having to look elsewhere, increasing their speed in addressing performance shortfalls. In addition, all scorecards and metrics have owners attached to them so there is no question as to who is responsible for performance exceptions. Build metrics and scorecards based on reliable information -- Administrators can create metrics, process diagrams and scorecards once and then use them across the organization to ensure that everyone is using the same definitions and working toward the same targets. Metrics can integrate a range of cross-functional data from virtually any source, including OLAP, dimensionally-aware relational data, ERP and CRM systems, spreadsheets, flat files and user-entered values. Intuitive wizards guide you through the metrics and scorecard design process to add new strategic objectives and supporting metrics, reducing the time spent in scorecard maintenance and updates.

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IBM Cognos Real-time Monitoring dramatically reduces the burden on IT resources: Minimize downtime. IT can automatically upgrade the software or download patches, minimizing the typical downtime of software maintenance and problem resolution. Simplify administration. The Workbench provides a central place for administrators to set up data sources and analytic models to present current information, historical data, or aggregated views. Centralized security. User-, group-, and role-based access granularity is supported by a centralized security model providing access control to any IBM Cognos Real-time Monitoring object event, cube, view, dimension, rule, alert, portlet, or dashboard.

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By understanding how your data is distributed, being able to see the shape of the data and knowing if your data fits a normal distribution or a linear curve when one item is evaluated against another, you can conclude whether certain variables influence other variables in a positive or negative way. With Cognos Statistics you can: Look at averages and standard deviations. Obtain information to interpret statistical tests, such as the mean for groups of interest. Create histograms and box plots that business users can visually scan for interesting looking patterns or spot something unexpected in the data. For example, using Cognos Statistics to analyze corporate data with key information, such as customer data and historical usage, you can answer questions such as, How much did the average customer spend on a particular product? and Is the distribution of prices for my brand consistent, or do the prices cluster mostly on the high or low end?

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Financial Analytics The IBM Cognos vision for Financial Analytics focuses on the relationship between three critical processes in the Office of Finance: close, consolidate, and report; plan, forecast, and control; and analyze and optimize. Clarity FSR is used by accounting and finance departments to create financial statements for external publication. The application has features that include: Report creation. Data from previous-period financial statements is automatically rolled forward into a pre-formatted template that already contains current-period data to accelerate report creation. XBRL tagging. Clarity FSR enables the attachment of XBRL tags information that defines and gives context to a financial data point or table to financial data, which is required for compliance with regulators such as the SEC. Audit trail creation. The application records every change to a document, and enables side-byside comparisons of different versions of a report. Project management. Workflow management tools enable finance departments to manage financial report creation by tracking the status of each section of a document and applying rules that determine when, under what circumstances, and by whom steps should be taken in the creation of a set of financial statements. Clarity FSR can pull from structured data sources including ERP systems, financial consolidation applications, relational databases, OLAP databases as well as unstructured data sources such as Microsoft Excel. The application can publish output in formats that include XBRL, Dynamic xHTML with embedded XBRL tags, Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, Adobe InDesign, and Edgar-ready, which is a format used by the SEC for making financial statements available to the public.

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OpenPages Enterprise governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software helps companies identify and manage risk and compliance activities across the enterprise through a single, integrated management system. * Solution overviews: Operational Risk Management (ORM), Financial Controls Management (FCM), General Compliance Management (GCM), IT Governance (ITG) and Audit Management. * The OpenPages governance platform offers a uniquely configured view of an organizations risk and control frameworks. * Manage IT risk and compliance through improved visibility, better decision support, and enhanced corporate performance * Integrated Operational Risk management to support Basel II AMA requirements * Loss event and KRI capture OpenPages enables a programmatic method to deal with business uncertainty and the associated risk and opportunity. By utilizing disciplined risk and compliance management programs, firms can manage unexpected outcomes and reduce the impact of risk events when they do occur, while empowering business managers to make decisions that maximize value, reduce cost and balance risk with returns.

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With integrated Lotus Connections, users can: Link directly from Lotus Connections to a Cognos Business Insight dashboard Use single sign-on for both Business Insight dashboards and Lotus Connections Add other individuals to an Activity at any point in the decision-making process Search for Activities directly from the Business Insight window Send email notifications directly from the Activity Post messages, share files and links to websites, create to-do items and assign them Save, organize and share bookmarks Organize Activities into sections to keep projects on track Filter Activities based on the dashboard

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Support, downloads, resources, and contact information on any of the IBM products, including Cognos, can be accessed through IBM PartnerWorld. IBM encourages all Partners to join, use, and benefit from IBM PartnerWorld.

The link to IBM PartnerWorld is

http://www-2000.ibm.com/partnerworld/pwhome.nsf/weblook/index_us.html

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