Book Image

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10.1 Dashboarding Cookbook

By : Ankit Garg
Book Image

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10.1 Dashboarding Cookbook

By: Ankit Garg

Overview of this book

IBM Cognos 10 BI is the leader in the Gartner quadrant in terms of BI capabilities. There have been new features introduced with IBM Cognos 10 BI in terms of dashboards and BI. The book intends to highlight the latest and advanced dashboarding features introduced with IBM Cognos 10 BI. The book covers Business Insight and Business Insight Advanced in a comprehensive manner. It also covers best practices in terms of creating and distributing dashboards using IBM Cognos 10 BI, without which no BI solution would look presentable, usable and efficient. The book covers the new IBM Cognos 10 dashboarding capabilities in detail and a comprehensive manner. There whole content is divided in to step-by-step recipes, each of which covers a specific link in the whole chain of understanding and learning.Recipes are augmented with real steps and screenshots which nullify chances of error or misjudgement.These along with explanation, tips and information will help users to completely follow recipes and have a clear and concise understanding and will eventually enable them to use these in their own areas of interest.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10.1 Dashboarding Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introduction


IBM Cognos 10 BI is the leading performance management tool, which enables users to monitor, measure, and manage corporate performance at a glance.

With its dashboard capabilities, users can assemble and organize data in personalized dashboard views to support different decision-making requirements.

IBM Cognos 10 BI is a bundle of tools that are accessible through a web interface and can be used for different sets of requirements. The following table briefly touches upon each of these:

IBM Cognos BI component name

Use case

Report Studio

Advanced report authoring interface where queries and calculations can be created manually. User needs to have BI designer skills.

Analysis Studio

Interface to perform dimensional data analysis where an analyst can slice and dice data stored in the multidimensional format.

Query Studio

Business users can perform ad hoc data analysis. Simple queries are generated on the fly.

Event Studio

Used to managing data related situations and triggering actions based on specific data conditions.

Business Insight

Users can use existing components to assemble and distribute sophisticated dashboards.

Business Insight Advanced

Business users can author reports and dashboards in a way similar to Report Studio, but with much less complexity. Queries are generated on the fly and no manual creation of queries is required. It provides functionality that is a subset of Report Studio with an intuitive and easy user interface.

IBM Cognos 10 BI has introduced IBM Cognos Business Insight and IBM Cognos Business Insight Advanced, which are the two components that can be used to author and view dashboards.

IBM Cognos Business Insight is used to create sophisticated interactive dashboards from the existing content. For instance, assume a user has already created four different reports each catering to sales, marketing, HR, and finance, using Report Studio. Individual sections in these reports can then be used in IBM Cognos Business Insight independently, to create an interactive dashboard. This would mean that the dashboard can have a few charts from the first two reports, and a list and a crosstab from third and fourth reports respectively.

IBM Cognos Business Insight Advanced is used to perform deeper analysis and report authoring where a user can perform more advanced data exploration, such as adding additional measures, conditional formatting, and advanced calculations. This can be thought of as a clipped version of IBM Cognos Report Studio, which is a complex report authoring tool in which queries and calculations can be built.

In this book we will be covering various aspects of IBM Cognos 10 Business Insight and IBM Cognos 10 Business Insight Advanced.

Readers are advised to install and configure IBM Cognos 10 BI and Samples (GO Sales and GO Data Warehouse), provided with the tool installation kit. For detailed installation and configuration instructions, please refer to IBM Cognos 10 BI Installation and Configuration Guide, shipped with the product.