Tag Archive for: IBM Cognos

Great news for those on the West Coast, beginning in 2014 Ironside will offer a series of IBM Business Analytics public training classes in California! Ironside training offerings will include a variety of IBM Cognos, TM1, and SPSS training, taught by some of the best trainers in the industry. Classes will be held in Irvine with plans to expand to Central and North California.

Ironside training programs are geared toward providing customers with a complete and relevant educational experience, incorporating instructor led material, student focused workshops, and hands-on demos. Ironside Group’s training offerings lay a solid foundation for future development in all aspects of IBM Business Analytics.

If you are interested in attending an IBM Business Analytics training course in California you can attended one of the following training courses:

  • 2/17/2014 -Report Studio Fundamental and Advanced Training
  • 3/10/2014 -Framework manager Fundamentals & Advanced
  • 4/7/2014 – Cognos Administration Training
  • 4/10/2014 -Workspace & Workspace Advanced
  • 5/12/2014 -Dynamic Cubes Fast Track
  • 6/16/2014 – Report Studio Fundamentals & Advanced
  • 7/14/2014 – Framework Manager Fundamentals & Advanced
  • 8/11/2014 – Dynamic Cubes Fast Track

 

If you have any questions or to learn more about Ironside’s business analytics training, check out our full course catalog. You can also see our full list of public courses or investigate options for having a private course taught onsite at your organization.

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.

 

In June 2013, IBM introduced its rapidly adaptive visualization engine (RAVE) as part of IBM Cognos 10.2.1. This highly evolved engine raises the visualization standard within the business analytics landscape, and can be fully customized to fit any specific business requirements.

RAVE or Extensible Visualizations are far more advanced than what we are accustomed to. They are interactive, animated and are available in more variety, including heat maps, spider maps, tag clouds, bubble charts etc. 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

Difficulty: Easy

Required Ingredients: Report Studio, List Object, PDF Viewer

Scenario:

A report that you expected to be viewed exclusively in HTML will need to be printed. In order to do this, you switch the output to PDF to create a printable report and find that the columns span across multiple pages, making the report more difficult to understand.

You’ll need to make some minor modifications in order for the printable report to remain effective. Read more

Update 9/9/2013 – Cognos 10.2.1 FP1 has been released – Click to learn more about how this fix pack adds and enhances important functionality of IBM Cognos 10.2.1.

On June 11th, IBM announced the release of Cognos 10.2.1, billed as a refresh pack, but loaded to the brim with new features, enhancements and improvements. The Ironside Group participated in the 10.2.1 beta earlier this year and had the opportunity to fully vet these new and exciting features and we have been anxiously awaiting general availability of this release. Read more

In continuing with our Report Studio Cookbook series, this month’s cookbook recipe will show you the steps for altering report XML to make bulk changes. This is most commonly used when name changes are made to the FM Model and abandoned data items result. Read more

Difficulty: Medium

Required Ingredients: Two or more crosstabs, Report Studio, report formatting

Scenario:

You have two or more crosstabs on a Report Studio report. All of the crosstabs should have the same report formatting, which differs from the Cognos default. Read more

In a world of ever changing government and industry regulations, many organizations are having a challenging experience efficiently meeting compliance requirements. Additionally, as the economy continues to sputter, organizations are exploring new ways to reduce loss, improve decision making around resource allocation, and optimize their business processes. With the latest release of IBM’s Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) solutions, which includes: OpenPages and Algorithmics, meeting these requirements and beginning to improve processes internally can become seamless. The painful, long drawn out process of managing market, credit and liquidity risk can soon become an efficient exercise. Integrating your current reporting technologies (IBM or not) will help your organization gain greater risk visibility and be ready for any challenges. Read more