Fast analytics is the new addiction! As decision making yearns to get faster, easier, and more accurate by the decade, technology giants such as IBM continue to invest billions of dollars to bring their strategy and business visions to reality. This book encompasses those billion dollar ideas and innovations into a new product from IBM's Business Analytics division.
IBM Cognos Insight is the new analytics software targeted to improve decision making at all levels. It starts with the basic concepts of business intelligence and advanced analytics but has the ability to expand from medium to enterprise levels by collaborating and sharing data analysis seamlessly. The in-memory computing improves querying performance and the options to connect to different data sources including IBM Cognos suite of products establishes this as a robust and flexible application.
As part of the IBM Cognos family of products, Cognos Insight is regarded as the personal analytics, "desktop-residing" application that provides rich dashboard style reports in minutes. The simplicity and intuitiveness of this product minimizes the learning curve and empowers the end user by making them proactive and independent in their efforts to analyze data. As the end users build their analysis, they have the ability to deploy to larger audiences seamlessly or share their analysis offline and sync up their contributions once back in connected online mode.
With the in-memory engine, corporations can leverage the write-back capabilities to build budgets, plans, and forecasts. This alternate scenario building technology helps analysts and decision makers in formulating better business cases for industry domains ranging across finance to risk management, procurement to information technology, and so on.
The ability to collaborate and share data analysis with larger work groups across the organization is accomplished using the high-fidelity, centralized, and administratively-governed publishing mechanism which increases productivity and adds immediate business value.
IBM Cognos Insight's features and functionalities lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) hugely due to reduced software and associated hardware license costs, a self-service approach to a simple yet powerful product that minimizes the learning curve and maximizes usability, and enterprise deployment capabilities, thereby generating a high return on investment (ROI).
This book provides new and existing users of business analytics with details about IBM Cognos Insight from an implementation, installation, and usability approach. IBM's vision, leadership, and new product, Cognos Insight, were the inspiration behind writing this book which also helped achieve my personal goal of being a published author.
Chapter 1, The New-age Analytics and IBM Cognos Insight introduces the concept of business analytics and the technologies such as Business Intelligence, Performance Management, Predictive Analytics, and Risk Management that have fused together to form the core of Analytics. This chapter then introduces IBM Cognos Insight as the new in-memory, desktop application from IBM and focuses on the path of a successful Business Analytics implementation.
Chapter 2, Installing IBM Cognos Insight installs IBM Cognos Insight and sets up the application to be a collaborative tool with IBM TM1 and IBM Cognos Business Intelligence.
Chapter 3, Usability of IBM Cognos Insight is meant to showcase the features and functionalities of the product with explanations of its benefits and uses. At the end of the chapter, IBM Cognos Insight workspaces should be easy to build.
Chapter 4, Strategic Decision Making Using IBM Cognos Insight talks about the business cases of using IBM Cognos Insight in the real world and how to leverage the information in Chapter 3, Usability of IBM Cognos Insight to build workspaces in Cognos Insight for finance, sales, marketing, and advertising groups.
Chapter 5, Enterprise Collaboration demonstrates the deployment of IBM Cognos Insight workspaces into IBM Cognos BI and TM1 products. This chapter will demonstrate the power and seamless publish mechanism that takes the desktop built workspaces into enterprise environments.
References provides the sources that will be quite valuable to you.
A desire for "fast-analytics-now" is the key requirement for this book. The product speaks for itself and the book shows new and existing users all the aspects of the product. Having a computer around with the minimum product requirements mentioned in Chapter 2, Installing IBM Cognos Insight will help in learning the features in Chapter 3, Usability of IBM Cognos Insight and finally building the workspaces in Chapter 4, Strategic Decision Making Using IBM Cognos Insight. Having access to Cognos or TM1 environments will benefit those readers looking to publish their workspaces. Nonetheless, the book gives readers all the information required to work on a day to day basis with the IBM Cognos Insight.
This book is for anyone and everyone looking to build personal analytics. With a simple desktop installation, the product is ready to go in minutes and builds dashboards in seconds. This product is for those in and out of the corporate world who are looking for immediate answers. This product and the book bring value to any organization by beginning with small to medium analyses and deploying them to enterprise-grade environments. The menu driven creation of dashboard style analysis and the ability to share them creates an organization-wide waterfall effect by going from the desktop to server with minimal to no coding required.
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