Tag Archive for: Business Analytics

Using Cognos we can generate reports in Excel, Microsoft Word and Power Point. In this article we will see what components we need to produce these reports in Microsoft Office.

Required Components and Installations:

1. You need to have Cognos environment ready and useable for generating reports, as shown below.

Cognos Connection

2. You have to install Microsoft Office in all the destination systems or client machines where we are going to access Cognos reports using Microsoft Office components. Read more

Use the SPSS Modeler Text Analytics Add-On to Monitor Social Media

As channels of social media penetrate people’s daily life more extensively and intensively, bad reviews and negative opinions travel faster than ever before. Research and surveys have shown that people are far more likely to spread the word about bad experience than a favorable one . Social media, by providing numerous opportunities for word-spreading, escalates this process. It is in the best interest of businesses to monitor comments on social media in real time. Read more

clock graphicSecurity in Cognos is extremely robust, permitting or denying very precise access to data elements in a package, data source, or even to row level access in a database. Read & Execute permissions are usually applied to a report allowing certain Groups or Roles the ability to run a report. However, you can also allow or deny access to a report to only let it execute within specific hours of the day. Read more

Ironside is proud to announce the creation of the Ironside Solution Center; a dedicated on-shore team providing services to support our clients’ strategic development initiatives. In addition to client development initiatives, the Solution Center will spearhead the research and development of Ironside Solutions products. A full-time core team of skilled consultants staff the Solution Center from our Lexington, MA office and business vertical and subject matter experts from within our organization augment the team when needed to rapidly scale and meet client project needs.

Service Offerings

Ironside provides two key services through the Ironside Solution Center: a project-based offering and an enhanced managed services offering.

– The project based offering is a time and material model where the hours and costs are determined by the scope of the project and skills required.
– The enhanced managed services offering allows the client to purchase blocks of time on a periodic basis, e.g. annually or quarterly, and consume those blocks within a predefined timeframe.

Engagement Model

The Ironside Solution Center Manager is a dedicated resource involved in all services that the core team provides, reviewing specifications, work plans, deliverables, and time tables with an onsite Ironside project manager or client project manager. The Solution Center Manager engages Solution Center resources as needed on a per-project basis.

Communication is paramount in this model, and the Solution Center Manager tracks project plans, provides status updates, and ensures quality of work to guarantee the timely delivery of cost-effective solutions to Ironside clients.

Considerations for Ironside Solution Center Engagements

If any of the following considerations are a priority for your company, the Solutions Center could be of great benefit to you:

– Large scale development or upgrades
– Bulk QA or report remediation
– Budget constraints for travel and expenses
– High quality deliverables without the expense of multiple boutique consultant resources
– Dedicated resources for your hosted / managed environments

Solution Center Benefits

A number of crucial advantages come along with engaging the Ironside Solution Center. Below are some highlights:

– Flexibility and predictability in budgeting based upon engagement model
– Local in-house development environment managed by a senior dedicated resource
– Lower travel and expense costs
– Potential to expand expertise / skills / footprint as projects evolve
– Wealth of knowledge from the entire Ironside Consulting Services organization
– Project management tools, templates, processes and methodology

Meet the Team

All members of the core team are IBM Certified in various skillsets and are based out of our corporate headquarters in Lexington, MA.

Solution Center Manager – De Hsieh

de hsiehDe is a senior consultant for Ironside, and is an ideal fit for leading the Solution Center team. He has an unmatched insight into the complexities, challenges, and best practices associated with a vast array of different industries and functional areas. During his six year tenure with Ironside, De has used his in-depth expertise with every aspect of the IBM Cognos suite to quickly and effectively devise and deploy solutions for clients, even in the most complex enterprise environments. With an impressive history of diverse, dynamic projects under his belt, De can speak the language of end users and stakeholders of all types and transform goals and requirements into usable, actionable, and productive results that put companies on the cutting edge of their sector.

Solution Center Core Team: Technical Consultants

The Ironside Solution Center team is a group of driven, innovative, and highly knowledgeable consultants who will do everything possible to make your organization’s key projects successful. Each member below brings a unique set of capabilities to the table that they are proud to leverage in service of Ironside’s clients.

Pankti Shah

Pankti Shah

Aimee Carvalho

aimee carvalho

Katie Ketcham

katie ketcham

Bernadette Kennedy-Cox

bernadette kennedy-cox

Sagarr Kanoje

Sagarr Kanoje

 Conclusion

The Ironside Solution Center provides our clients with the benefits of a cost-effective, flexible project delivery model that guarantees the security of their data within a US based development center. In addition, the Solution Center grants our clients the confidence and peace of mind necessary to execute on key strategic deliverables that help them stay competitive in a modern, information-focused business environment. If you’d like to learn more about the team and what they can offer your organization, check out the Solution Center team page.

 

Utilize IBM SPSS Statistics and R to Produce a Combination Correlation Table and Graphs

IBM SPSS Statistics is very powerful software that allows complex data analyses to be performed. R is a very useful software environment that provides a coding language tailored to statistical operations. This article will give an outline of the procedure to enable the use of SPSS Statistics and R to add even more functionality to the use of SPSS Statistics. The example that will be used is generation of a combination correlation table and various graphs using this integration. Read more

IBM Business Analytics North America Partner AwardLexington, MA (November 1, 2013) – Ironside has  been named the IBM Business Analytics North America Business Partner Excellence Award winner for 2013. Ironside will receive the award at IBM’s Information on Demand Conference on November 2 in Las Vegas.

The award recognizes the IBM Business Analytics North America Business Partner that has delivered exceptional solutions using IBM products and service in the business analytics space. Read more

Ironside is proud to announce the launch of its innovation center with a number of exciting new packaged Ironside solutions built on the IBM Business Analytics and Information Management portfolio. These solutions are designed to accelerate and multiply client return on investment and address specific functional and industry business problems. Be sure to contact us or stop by our booth at IBM Information on Demand next week to speak to our industry and functional solution experts in person. Read more

softlayer logoIn our never-ending quest to provide best-in-class managed business analytics to their diverse portfolio of customers, Ironside is pleased to announce we have entered into a new strategic partnership with SoftLayer (An IBM Company). Ironside is one of the world’s only managed services providers that exclusively specializes in the hosting and cloud deployment of managed IBM Business Analytics and Information Management solutions. Widely regarded as the foremost IBM Business Analytics and Information Management platform experts, Ironside brings decades of combined implementation and platform management experience and expertise that our consulting customers have enjoyed since 1999. Read more

Much has been written recently about the value of transforming data into useful information for decision making. It has become a strategic must-have for organizations to figure out how to use the structured historical data they already own, make sense of the ever-expanding amount of unstructured social media data out there, and implement the appropriate analytics platform to use these assets to their fullest extent through developing business intelligence maturity. Read more