Cognos Performance 2008 - Sydney Presentation

Post Reply
User avatar
Alan Kirk
Site Admin
Posts: 6606
Joined: Sun May 11, 2008 2:30 am
OLAP Product: TM1
Version: PA2.0.9.18 Classic NO PAW!
Excel Version: 2013 and Office 365
Location: Sydney, Australia
Contact:

Cognos Performance 2008 - Sydney Presentation

Post by Alan Kirk »

Although I went primarily to look for TM1 information, this was a Cognos presentation and I'll therefore put this post in that group.

There was a pretty significant turn out. I did a rough estimate of the number of badges that they had out for collection... they were laid out in columns of 10, with 17 or 18 columns to a table, and little over four full tables were devoted to the badges. You can do the mathematics for yourself.

The presentation started off with a video of a car racing down the highway representing... "performance"! Let me think now; driving my car along some of the winding bits of the Federal Highway on the way to Canberra... doing a slice of actuals versus budget. Accelerating out of a corner... viewing a web sheet. Sorry, epic comparison fail.

The keynote presentation was given by Don Campbell, the Chief Technology Officer. He's a good public speaker; injected a bit of humour without it being forced, and more importantly kept the presentation on track and at a good pace in a fluid and articulate fashion. He wasn't one of those speakers who just reads out the points on a PowerPoint presentation.

The first bit of the presentation was largely a "motherhood" one which extols the obvious virtues of an effective BI solution. They gave an example of one business which supposedly achieved a return on investment of 1822% from better information. The gist of the pitch was "we know everyone's tightening their belts, but hey, we can save you money so please please please buy our products!"

He emphasised that Cognos will continue to focus on the BI and performance management sector regardless of the IBM takeover, though later presentations would go into how you could leverage other IBM software as part of a total solution.

He described the three key questions that Cognos solutions set out to answer as being:
- How are we doing based on historical information. This is done by measuring and monitoring, with dashboards as the output;
- Why are we getting those results. This is the reporting and analysis function; and
- What should we be doing. This is revising plans for the future.

They took a survey of the challenges that businesses encounter; amongst other things they found that 47% of users don't trust the information that they have. From my own experience, I can understand that given that so much is reliant upon source systems being accurately and completely updated at the time that reporting is done. Not to mention, {cough}, "interpretation issues". Another interesting result of this survey was that only 24% were using the tools available to them. I know that feeling as well; users often have so much on their plate that they're disinclined to learn new tools, even ones as relatively friendly as TM1. I think that Cognos underestimates how much of a learning curve an end user in (say) sales or marketing will see in their products. Most of them are easy to use as long as you're doing it constantly and are fully familiar with the tool. If you use it once every couple of months, it's pretty easy to forget how to generate your own dashboards.

This leads him to a further survey that they did regarding user wants:
- They want information that they can trust (well duh);
- They want good-looking dashboards and reports;
- They want easy ways to find the right information on their own.

I'd have to beg to differ with the last point. More computer literate users will indeed like to be able to fossick for their own information, but in my experience the majority of the users show great resistance to learning to do anything very much for themselves (at least when it comes to computer systems). They just want to load a spreadsheet and press F9 however much I try to cajole them; "See, look how simple it is! It's just like a pivot table!" "But I don't know how to use a pivot table!" "Well I can show you!" "Ummm, maybe later..." This will probably change as more and more people who have known computers since primary school enter the workforce, but I think it would be unwise to underestimate the number who see the use of a computer or software as a necessary burden rather than a nice curve on the Federal Highway.

Of course, for some of those in the "since primary school" camp it would help if Cognos adopted a Halo 3 interface.

Nonetheless, this provides an important insight into what you can expect from Cognos solutions; like it or not, you'll have (for example) user customisable dashboards and it will just be a case of having to make sure that the people who don't want to and never will learn to use this kind of customisation have sufficient easily accessible standard reports to meet their needs.

Apparently Cognos 8 version 4 will be out at the end of this month. It has new capabilities in dashboards and managing dimensions, and the dashboards will apparently be easier to implement. It will also more extensively leverage the IBM infrastructure as I mentioned earlier. It's claimed to be faster, have a new Web client, a hierarchical view and most importantly TM1 integration. They ran a series of testimonial videos from people who had been doing beta testing. Funky graphics were playing in the background as these people spoke.

(Memo to IBM video directors; having rainbows appear to fly into one ear and out the other is not a good look when it comes to people who you're trying to portray as intelligent champions of your product.)

Some of the new features will be:
- Integration with the IBM glossary tool (which allows you to define terms used in your reports so that users understand what information they are looking at; for example, you could have a definition of Gross Profit, which might be useful for non-accountant line managers. Vastly oversimplified example, but consider, say, the uses that this could be put to for reports of complex production processes);
- Lineage, that is, the ability to trace data back to its source;
- Annotations, which allow people to add commentary about values;
- New chart types and formatting;
- And, for the life of me I cannot understand the point of this, the ability to know where someone is viewing reports from if they're doing it on a mobile phone which is equipped with GPS. This seems just a little bit Big Brotherish to me, not to mention completely and utterly pointless. Although it may be interesting to know if the CFO is checking his reports in a bordello in Paris, I seriously doubt the usefulness of it.

They also demonstrated how reports can indeed be displayed on mobile phones. I'm not sure that I buy it. Certainly it works in theory, but in reality can anyone get useful analytical information from such a small space? Half a dozen stock prices, maybe. Sales trends for a dozen divisions? Give me a break.

One of the objectives that Cognos has, and I think it's a worthy one, is to engage with the users. In this way it would be possible to overcome that 24% figure that I mentioned earlier. One way of doing this will be to provide a search engine similar to Google's. The user will be able to do a free-form search and a list of possible matching reports will be returned. Administrators can also configure suggested results (which may not match all of the criteria input) in the style of Google's "sponsored results". (Incidentally, is there anyone out there who doesn't have a 100% effective metal filter for those sponsored results? I was once doing user testing (as a subject) for a real estate Web site. The tester was quite surprised to see me completely ignore the highlighted results down the side of the page and go straight to the main body of the page. My brain had already filtered the highlighted results as possible quasi-spam which, like sponsored results, would have at best a vaguely tangential relevance to what I was really searching for. He seemed most disappointed, and probably remains convinced to this day that that's not how most people work.)

The ability to use a slider on the web page to regulate the display of charts was interesting. He then gave some demonstrations on how to customise and assemble your own reports including a Web gauge which was truly, truly ugly. (It had needles pointing all over the place, and the values that they pointed to covered so much of the gauge that it was effectively useless in conveying information either graphically or numerically. But it had pretty colours!)

He then gave a brief example of dimension maintenance via drag and drop, which I'll come back to in a moment.

The last thing mentioned was more granular control on security, though that's unlikely to affect TM1 users who can already secure down to cell level.

The conference then broke into three streams:
- Performance Management Infrastructure, which concentrated on integration with IBM Infosphere solutions;
- Business Intelligence Applications. This went out heavily on Cognos BI; and
- Financial Performance Manager. This contained the greatest amount of TM1 content (in theory), which is why I elected to go for it. Unfortunately, I couldn't be in three places at once. Actually, in one instance that was singularly unfortunate, but I'll come back to that.

The first presentation was described as follows:
Dimension Management
Attend this session to find out about an excisting new offering from Cognos that is targeted for availibility later this year. This innovative dimension management solution provides value across the organisation from bsuiness users, to financial and business analysts, to data modelers and data stewards. It replaces the manual, error prone efforts of capturing new hierarchies and attributes for business dimensions with a common viewpoint that business users can easily maintain, govern and share with confidence.
And no, DragonDictate hasn't suddenly lost its ability to spell; the paragraph above was copied directly from the Cognos website, spelling mistakes and all. I wonder if the new Web presentation tools have a spell checker.

Anyway, the tool in question is called Business Viewpoint. It provides users with a visual way of maintaining a hierarchy. It's like a more attractive version of the Dimension Editor but with better drag-and-drop facilities, and much more importantly, the ability to distribute responsibility for hierarchy changes to the businesses themselves in a structured way. You can implement version control and rollback, as well as a full workflow process with approvals and dependencies which ensure that the approvals are done in the correct order. Naturally, there is a security-by-role model here as well. Apparently there is also a subscription system for notifying people of changes, though that wasn't demonstrated.

This is an attractive tool for doing small-scale changes, though in the event of a merger or acquisition I'd hate to be having to add a couple of hundred products through ANY graphical user interface. That would probably be unnecessary, though, since dimension information can be brought back into Business Viewpoint as needed. That means that you could do bulk changes through the vastly superior .xdi interface :D and simply use Business Viewpoint to do the fine tuning.

This is the integrated metadata tool that was referred to in my report of the final Applix Asia-Pacific Conference, if anyone remembers my post on that. The big advantage that it has is that you can maintain the hierarchies in one place and then propagate them out to Cognos Planning, TM1, BI and so on without needing to separately update the hierarchies in each system.

This may seem like it was a fairly perfunctory session, but most of it was taken up with a demonstration of the tool. It was therefore extremely useful in my opinion.

(Though for you consultants who always despair at a system crashing on you during a demo, Cognos has worked out the solution. Although the guy appeared to be doing a live presentation, it was actually canned. It used a media player called VLC to simulate all of the actions. This is great if you're doing a presentation in front of a couple of hundred people who can't ask questions, but could be a little embarrassing if you're doing a one-on-one and the potential customer asks you:
"Can you show me how to do X?"
"Ummmmmm, {points over customer's shoulder} oh look, an eagle!"
Personally, I prefer Adobe Captivate. But then, I also like to use screenshots of medieval fortresses from Medieval II Total War to demonstrate analogies of system security. "The VPN is like the outer wall of this fortress. You gain access to the gates by...")

The second session was described thus:
Operational & Financial Planning
See how IBM Cognos Planning and IBM Cognos TM1 provide all the necessary capabilities to meet the diverse needs of Enterprise Planning & Analysis across your organisation. Learn how the combination of IBM Cognos Planning's process management, driver based planning, and high participation capabilities combined with IBM Cognos TM1 ability to analyse high volumes of data in real-time will meet your organisation's needs to both operational, financial planning and analysis.
I'm sorry, is it just me, or would you expect a pretty substantial amount of TM1/Cognos integration information in that session? In reality, TM1 got mentioned about twice. This session started at 11:05 a.m. The first 25 minutes were taken up with slowly-delivered motherhood statements about how important it is to create a planning and forecasting system. At one point the presenter had two graphical images up; one showing where we are now driving along at 35 mph (memo Cognos; metric came into this country in 1975), and where we would like to be which is driving at 75 mph. Which, incidentally is illegal everywhere here aside from the Northern Territory. In theory. {Cough.} Anyway, the presenter could have done with some of that because this presentation was, if I may be charitable, soporific. The most interesting part was when he showed lists of companies which use Cognos solutions; a list which included Washington Mutual. Helloooo... doesn't anybody vet these slides??

About the only interesting things that I noted from this presentation were that:
- Cognos Planning can show you when data was last updated which you can use to control a budgeting or planning cycle;
- You can adjust target amounts at either line or consolidation level. I'm not sure whether that has been incorporated into Cognos planning as such, or whether this was using TM1 spreading as the back end;
- Cognos Planning is apparently not dependent on being online. This is interesting.
- You can get some best practice models from the Cognos Innovation Centre. I'm not sure that there's a lot of TM1-specific stuff there, though.

The presentation of examples (such as it was; it didn't start until 11:30) was also pre-recorded. This time you couldn't see the media player border around the window, but it's rather obvious when the clock in the system tray keeps jumping around all over the place. (Though I have to admit that I did something like this on one of my Captivate presentations. Most of them don't show the system clock, but in one it was visible in one segment of the presentation. I'd recorded one part of the segment at 5:30 in the morning and the other at 8:30 at night. I ended up copying the clock part of the images from the earlier recording and pasting them over the clock in the later one. No, I do not want to hear the words "control freak" thank you all the same.)

The third presentation is one I shouldn't have gone to at all, though that's not the fault of the presenter who gave warning at the start that it wasn't even going to be TM1 101. However by that time it was too late to change rooms.
Getting More from Your Spreadsheets for Business Analytics
Spreadsheets are pervasive, familiar, flexible — and ideal for formatting and presenting information. But they do a poor job of managing data and providing security and scalability. Discover how using IBM Cognos TM1 can give you the best of both worlds — the flexibility that users want with the controls that your business requires.
This was really just an introduction to TM1 for Cognos users who had never used it before. There was almost nothing in there that any reader of this post would be unaware of, except possibly for the fact that with the new release of Cognos 8, the Framework Manager can connect directly to TM1.
"To them, equipment failure is terrifying. To me, it’s 'Tuesday.' "
-----------
Before posting, please check the documentation, the FAQ, the Search function and FOR THE LOVE OF GLUB the Request Guidelines.
User avatar
jim wood
Site Admin
Posts: 3951
Joined: Wed May 14, 2008 1:51 pm
OLAP Product: TM1
Version: PA 2.0.7
Excel Version: Office 365
Location: 37 East 18th Street New York
Contact:

Re: Cognos Performance 2008 - Sydney Presentation

Post by jim wood »

Alan,

Brillinat write up as usual my friend. All sounds very interesting. The BI segment is of particular use to myself as we are currently changing our BI toold set and BI 8 is one of the ones being considered.

Thanks again,

Jim.

PS. You have far too much time on your hands. I think I may buy you a copy of WOW (World of Warcraft) for Christams and watch that time flitter away!! :twisted:
Struggling through the quagmire of life to reach the other side of who knows where.
Shop at Amazon
Jimbo PC Builds on YouTube
OS: Mac OS 11 PA Version: 2.0.7
User avatar
Alan Kirk
Site Admin
Posts: 6606
Joined: Sun May 11, 2008 2:30 am
OLAP Product: TM1
Version: PA2.0.9.18 Classic NO PAW!
Excel Version: 2013 and Office 365
Location: Sydney, Australia
Contact:

Re: Cognos Performance 2008 - Sydney Presentation

Post by Alan Kirk »

jim wood wrote:Brillinat write up as usual my friend. All sounds very interesting. The BI segment is of particular use to myself as we are currently changing our BI toold set and BI 8 is one of the ones being considered.

Thanks again,

Jim.

PS. You have far too much time on your hands. I think I may buy you a copy of WOW (World of Warcraft) for Christams and watch that time flitter away!! :twisted:
Ah thank you, Jim, thank you. Although I'm not sure that WOW would be a good move for me since I'm a recovering Civaholic.

First video... "I'm hip, I'm modern, I'm the NEW Rome."

And of course I've never recovered from Rome: Total War addiction at all.

"Must... conquer... just...one... more... province!"
"To them, equipment failure is terrifying. To me, it’s 'Tuesday.' "
-----------
Before posting, please check the documentation, the FAQ, the Search function and FOR THE LOVE OF GLUB the Request Guidelines.
User avatar
jim wood
Site Admin
Posts: 3951
Joined: Wed May 14, 2008 1:51 pm
OLAP Product: TM1
Version: PA 2.0.7
Excel Version: Office 365
Location: 37 East 18th Street New York
Contact:

Re: Cognos Performance 2008 - Sydney Presentation

Post by jim wood »

I like the total war series myself. I never get time to play though. I'm always too busy playing WOW. 8-)
Struggling through the quagmire of life to reach the other side of who knows where.
Shop at Amazon
Jimbo PC Builds on YouTube
OS: Mac OS 11 PA Version: 2.0.7
User avatar
Alan Kirk
Site Admin
Posts: 6606
Joined: Sun May 11, 2008 2:30 am
OLAP Product: TM1
Version: PA2.0.9.18 Classic NO PAW!
Excel Version: 2013 and Office 365
Location: Sydney, Australia
Contact:

Re: Cognos Performance 2008 - Sydney Presentation

Post by Alan Kirk »

jim wood wrote:I like the total war series myself. I never get time to play though. I'm always too busy playing WOW. 8-)
I feel one of those famous OLAPForums "skewing away from the original topic at warp 7" digressions coming on, but verily, coming across this article today it's too much to resist:
Couple divorce after virtual-world 'affair'

November 14, 2008 - 8:44PM

A British woman is divorcing her husband after accusing his computer game character of cheating on her online alter ego.

{Snip}

He said his real marriage had been a "bit of a joke" and that Taylor spent too much time on another popular fantasy role-playing game, World of Warcraft.

"Amy never did anything around the house," he was quoted as saying in the British press.

"She just played World of Warcraft all the time.

"If I wanted to spend time with her I had to ask, but it was always too much trouble for her to come off the game to spend time with me."

The real-life divorce between Taylor and Pollard is set to be finalised next week.

Their virtual divorce went through in the Second Life courts in May.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/w ... 29116.html

{Raises hands and walks backwards out of the room} Not saying a word, me...
"To them, equipment failure is terrifying. To me, it’s 'Tuesday.' "
-----------
Before posting, please check the documentation, the FAQ, the Search function and FOR THE LOVE OF GLUB the Request Guidelines.
User avatar
jim wood
Site Admin
Posts: 3951
Joined: Wed May 14, 2008 1:51 pm
OLAP Product: TM1
Version: PA 2.0.7
Excel Version: Office 365
Location: 37 East 18th Street New York
Contact:

Re: Cognos Performance 2008 - Sydney Presentation

Post by jim wood »

All I can say is that I wish my wife was so easy to get rif of. She wouldn't go near anything like WOW or Second Life. (Not that I would go near that later anyway. At least WOW is game at the end of the day)
Struggling through the quagmire of life to reach the other side of who knows where.
Shop at Amazon
Jimbo PC Builds on YouTube
OS: Mac OS 11 PA Version: 2.0.7
Post Reply