The report is in! See the list of topics that readers, like you, found most interesting and that made it into our top 5 of 2014.

Top Training Tip

Creating a Burst Table for a Cognos Report  – Do you know how to create an external data file to use as a burst table for a Cognos report? If not, you can find step-by-step instructions in this guide. Learn how to create a Burst Table Read more

Nowadays, anyone from age two to ninety interacts with the internet in some form. Mobile devices have become an increasingly popular means of access. Technology innovations in the form of smartphones and tablets have dramatically changed the way we conduct our daily lives, both in business and personal settings. Because of this societal shift, tools like IBM Cognos Mobile, which delivers rich BI results in the office or on the go, are leading trends in IT. Research studies show that organizations that both prioritize mobile technology initiatives and implement a mobile strategy – not just for IT but across the entire company – are more likely to experience revenue growth and improve IT effectiveness . So with this in mind, what exactly is IBM Cognos Mobile, and what does it offer? Let’s take a quick look. Read more

Difficulty: Easy

Required Ingredients: Report Studio report

Scenario:

You have a highly formatted report in Report Studio and you need a better understanding of how the report is structured. Some of the items in the report maybe hidden and you can’t easily see how things are nested. Luckily, Page Structure view can help with that. Read more

Netezza on cloudIronside is excited to announce a ground breaking new solution for organizations wanting to leverage their analytics workload-optimized PureData for Analytics / Netezza appliance in conjunction with rest of their virtualized private cloud analytics architecture. Ironside’s IBM PureData for Analytics (PDA) for Cloud offering solves all of the major hurdles for connecting your physical big data appliance with your virtual cloud infrastructure: management and communications bandwidth and latency. Ironside is now uniquely able to provide hosting and management of your appliance in conjunction with direct, private, and secure network connectivity back to IBM SoftLayer or other major cloud providers. This means you can host your entire analytics architecture in the cloud and still take advantage of the massive benefits that a physical appliance provides in this application. Read more

To learn more about Cognos Analytics, the next-generation Cognos platform that IBM announced at Insight 2015, please check out our article on the product’s top 4 release features.

Update, October 6, 2015: Cognos 10.2.2 has been around for almost a year now, and we’ve had a lot of time to dig deeper into the features we discussed originally in this article. To keep you informed on what we’ve found out, this post’s original author Crystal Meyers has gone back and added new reflections and insights she’s gained while working with 10.2.2 in the field. Check out her new thoughts in italics below. Read more

Hospital readmissions are estimated to cost over $41 billion annually. Readmissions, specifically when patients are readmitted within 30 days of discharge, are quality metrics that hospitals watch closely. Healthcare organizations seek to understand what conditions are bringing patients back to the hospital. Many readmissions could be prevented if hospitals can identify the factors that indicate readmission in the patient population. Read more

Workforce Planning

On October 21st, Ironside hosted Robust Workforce Planning Enablement with IBM Cognos TM1 Webinar, where Ironside’s TM1  experts discussed the challenges and options for cube design and conducted a live demonstration of Ironside’s TM1 workforce planning solution.

Ironside’s planning solutions offer greater capabilities and flexibility than packaged cloud solutions or when compared against other enterprise planning offerings. Read more

Synopsis

This article covers how to allow access to a report with a password challenge prompt, creating a password protected report.

Overview

Security in Cognos is extremely robust, letting you permit or deny access to data elements on a package, data source, or even row level in a Database. Normally, standard group permissions conveniently control report execution access for most situations, but certain business applications may require a select subset of users to run a report who may not all be in the same group. In lieu of adding a separate group and assigning those users to it, a report can start with a prompt page with a password challenge response that allows only users with a valid password to run the report. Read more

Synopsis

How to create, implement and use conditional blocks in Cognos reports.

Overview

Conditional blocks show different display results based on user interaction or parameters read in when a report is run. They provide a creative method for presenting either the same report data in various formats or executing several completely different reports from one prompt page. Read more

Employee compensation accounts for most of the expense base for service-oriented companies. The true ‘driver’ for this expense revolves around workforce planning. Creating a projection that matches the size of the workforce to the demands of the business can be a difficult exercise. Like most complex tasks, breaking it down into manageable components makes it easier to implement. This is the core principle behind driver-based compensation planning. Read more