Archive for the ‘Cognos’ category

Big BI Fish in a Shrinking Pond?

June 15th, 2009

Timo Elliot has posted a rather nice visualisation of Gartner’s 2008 BI market share research as reported by Information Week. Timo has, not surprisingly, used Xcelsius and although I’m not quite sure why IBM/Cognos is seemingly struggling to keep up with the pack (when Microsoft actually has the smallest share) it clearly illustrates the staggering 24% market share held by SAP/BusinessObjects. Bear in mind that these vendors collectively have 64.5% of the market.

You can see Timo’s full post here, complete with a more readily interpreted, but not so pretty, bar chart

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Cognos, Technology

FREE Software for Teaching and Research

May 19th, 2009

I realise this is a bit of a plug for IBM Cognos but how good is this?

Who can join? Faculty members and researcher professionals at accredited institutions of learning and qualifying members of standards organizations, all over the globe. Membership is granted on an individual basis. There is no limit on the number of members from an institution that can join.

What does it cost? Your only “cost” to join is the time it takes you fill out the registration forms and get approved. After that, the majority of our offerings are available to you at no-charge. This includes the ability to download all the available IBM technology and courseware, remote access to certain hardware systems, participation in technical webcasts, electronic delivery of our newsletter, and much more.

Why bother to join? Members get access to a wider range of assets, are eligible for additional discounts and assistance, and build collaborative partnerships with IBM and other institutions in the open source community. With the possibility of leadership in your field, prestige for your school, and highly employable students….what’s not to like

Click here for more details

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Cognos, Higher Education

Metric Facts

April 14th, 2009

Is anyone out there using an aggregated fact table for managing KPI or organisational metric performance? I’m purely talking about the star schema design here to enable high-level reporting on data that already exists in the warehouse at an atomic level, things like:

EFTSL by School or Faculty
Student Satisfaction
Unit Enrolments

Having tried (and failed) to use Cognos Metric Store for this purpose, I think the most flexible and best performing results could be obtained from something like the following. I stress this is not in production, or even built yet, but does it ring any bells with anyone out there? Please comment if it does.

metrics_star_schema

I won’t get into product specifics here as I am interested in the design rather than the capabilities of specific products although I realise the product does at least influence the design to a certain extent.

There are two potential issues that I recognise with the above at present:

The grain of the fact varies according to the metric - some are annual, some semester-based
The dimensions are not all relevant for all metrics - we would need some N/A rows in the dim

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Posted in Cognos, Dimensional Models, Metrics

Pigs and Chickens

September 10th, 2008

A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?” The pig looks back at the chicken and says, “Good idea, what do you want to call it?” The chicken thinks about it and says, “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?” “I don’t think so,” says the pig, “I’d be committed but you’d only be involved.”

If you’ve read Ken Schwaber’s book ‘Agile Project Management with Scrum’ you’d know where this joke came from. I first heard about Agile a few months ago when I saw the Agile Manifesto pinned to the back of a colleague’s workstation- have a look at the words and tell me something. Is this appropriate as a methodology for development and delivery of BI? I happen to think it is, by a country mile. The words make perfect sense and if you read Ken’s book, so does the methodology.

Being an exiled POM, I cut my PM teeth with PRINCE and PRINCE2 and much as I take comfort in all that planning and definition, I have found it really difficult to apply to BI/DW development. So with that in mind we’re going to give Scrum a go. We have a significant project to deliver before the end of this year and right now the requirement is vague but the pressure is on to deliver. I’ll let you know how we go. If you are interested, please drop me a line or just a comment, it would be really useful to share war stories on this one.

Oh, and if you needed any further indication of relevance, I was talking to Don Campbell, Cognos’ CTO about this last week and guess what - Cognos use Scrum for their product development…

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Posted in Agile, Cognos, Scrum

Cognos on a Mac

September 9th, 2008

Big Problem - I want to use a Mac to administer Cognos but under v8 some tools, such as Report Studio, simply don’t work on anything other than IE6+ which doeosn’t exist for Mac. The Firefox v3 plugin for IE doesn’t work on the Mac version, and I’ve tried Parallels and BootCamp all with mixed results so I’d pretty much given up and resigned myself to using Citrix which works OK but isn’t quite as good as the real thing.

So why not just use a PC? Well I used to but being a university, half our clients have Mac’s and call me sensitive but surely it helps bridge the IT-Client gulf if you turn up with something familar, even if you just click away doing stuff they have no interest in, plus of course not having the instability issues is a plus.

Today was an Ephiphany, and I have to thank Cognos support who told me about the idea at the 2008 Forum. I downloaded a 30-day evaluation of VMware Fusion and installed Windows XP Pro in a 512MB VM. It took around 2GB of disk to get the basics in there and the end result is just great. I now have IE7 in a window that I can dock just like all my other Mac windows, that I can make full-screen for presentations and as an added bonus, even SharePoint looks ‘normal’ again. For under $100 I’m pleased.

Of course now I need to install anti-virus software on the VM but I can live with that for the convenience.