IBM’s Cognos Analytics combines governed business intelligence and self-serve exploratory analytics to provide significant and unique insights.
Two very different analytics philosophies, business intelligence and exploratory analytics have been combined to form IBM’s modern BI platform, Cognos Analytics. Combining a simple intuitive interface that is built upon IBM’s trusted enterprise data management platform, users can easily access curated data to build accurate, personalized and insightful reports, dashboards and visualizations to integrate business intelligence across any department. Each philosophy, although different in the roles and functions they serve, brings its own rich value set to an organization.
The Depth of Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is the collection and analysis of large amounts of structured data to provide historical, current and predictive views of the organization’s operations. The mining and discovery of this data is often performed at the IT level and serves the C-Suite in their ability to develop new business strategies and opportunities. Pre-determined data sets, schema and queries make up the architecture of BI to derive visibility to the state of an organization. From this analysis, an organization can gain understanding around what drives revenue, how to capitalize on trends, how to build a more consistent brand and create a more efficient business model. Extracting insights from this data is critical to high-level decisions and differentiation in today’s competitive marketplace.
The Breadth of Exploratory Analytics
Exploratory analytics is designed for users outside of the IT department, for example in sales and marketing, to explore data to be used in decision-making. Through ad hoc querying, testing and re-testing hypothesis, the users can understand, customize and utilize data and display the results of those queries and tests with dynamic visual representation. Exploratory analytics are based on a self-serve concept and allows users to customize each data journey based on the unique departmental need, giving them the freedom to explore theories in a non-linear fashion.
Unified Analytics: The Best of Both Worlds
IBM’s Cognos Analytics combines both philosophies, BI and Exploratory Analytics into one end-to-end enterprise solution for a consistent user experience. With results rooted in IBM’s strong enterprise data management platform, generating production-managed reports or self-service authored reports and dashboards are achievable for every level of user.
One of the most notable features of Cognos Analytics is the intent-driven data modeling that seeks to understand user intention and provide them with proper guidance. This intuitive function recognizes keywords to reveal a type-ahead list that provides a list of terms that are found in the source metadata. The software’s cognitive functionality promotes widespread user adoption.
Cognos also provides a clean, easy to use, single interface with a navigation panel that is straightforward. The panel includes elements such as natural language search capabilities, individual and team folders and templates for self-authored reports, dashboards and visualizations.
Cognos empowers the user and encourages broad insights and deep analytics to promote faster identification of trends and threats as well as the confidence to make strategic business decisions.
Download IBM Cognos Analytics – A bridge across the analytics chasm.
