The Importance of Planning Ahead

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As a new year approaches, new projects and initiatives within organizations of all types and sizes begin to surface. In order to ensure on-time completion and delivery of projects, it is crucial for organizations to always be looking ahead. As many IT teams are already feeling the squeeze of a heavy workload, managing expectations of business sponsors can be difficult.

Recently, Ironside Group spent time working with a life sciences organization in Massachusetts on an upgrade to Cognos 10. Although the initiative is slated to begin in early 2012, Ironside Group made it a point to begin the process in October to ensure on-time delivery for this time sensitive project. Since Ironside Group had no previous relationship with the client, Ironside made it a point to better understand their business by meeting with key business units within the organization who rely on Cognos daily. With IT’s help, Ironside quickly understood the importance of Cognos within the organization and started to generate an upgrade project plan. Read more

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Cloud Solutions for IBM Cognos Business Analytics

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The Ironside Group invites you to reduce the burden on your IT and accelerate your time to value by hosting your IBM Cognos Business Analytics application on our cloud computing environment.

When an organization begins to embark upon a Business Analytics initiative, they face several challenges including budget, lack of experienced resources and negotiations between the line of business and an overburdened IT department. In an effort to bridge the gap between line of business and IT, reduce the total cost of ownership and accelerate the time to value, The Ironside Group now offers a scalable, secure and reliable enterprise class cloud computing environment. Read more

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IBM Cognos Tabbed Report Design

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Often times developers will get a request to create several different variations of a single report. While this can be done with user prompting or even multiple versions of a report, another option would be to create tabs within a report which would allow for the user to easily switch between variations. In this month’s tech tip we’ll go over how to create this using drill-throughs, a string variable and a conditional block.

The first step is to identify what tabs you’ll want to display. Each one of the tabs will need to be set up individually. In our example (sample included) we’ll use the seven days of the week.

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IBM Information on Demand 2011 – Ironside Giveaways and Events

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Sunday October 23rd– Thursday October 27th

Flip Video Ultra HD The Ironside Group is proud to be a Gold Sponsor & Exhibitor at the Information on Demand Conference at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. We will be hosting numerous events throughout the week, including a private cocktail and dinner party on Monday evening. Please visit the Ironside Group’s booth which is located at #G1009 in the Business Analytics section on the main EXPO floor for a chance to win a Flip Video Camera or a $500 AMEX Gift card. The booth will be staffed daily with members of our sales and technical team. If you are attending IOD and are interested in scheduling a meeting with us, joining us at our private dinner event. Need advice about which IOD events would be best suited for you? Contact Kristin Brown at kbrown@ironsidegroup.com or 781-860-8840, and she will be happy to provide you with more information. For more information regarding Information on Demand 2011, please visit the event website http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/2011-conference/ .

$500 Amex Gift Card

Making Business Insight Dashboard Components with Report Studio

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Dashboarding with Business Insight

Business Insight is a new tool in Cognos 10. With it, pieces of existing reports can be combined into interactive dashboards. This allows users with less report authoring experience to create dashboards using components from more complex reports. (Business Insight should not be confused with Business Insight Advanced, a report creation tool alongside Report Studio or Query Studio that was also introduced in Cognos 10).

While Business Insight can use nearly any report item (chart, list, crosstab, etc.), there are some techniques and best practices which can make these items more “Business Insight friendly”. Read more

Embed Google Maps in IBM Cognos Reports

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IBM Cognos has a built-in map functionality that provides great visualization. With multiple layers on each map you can display data at different levels and even create drill throughs to other reports. It is a nice feature to visually present your data. However, everything has its limitations. There are some rich map features that IBM Cognos maps may not be able to provide; such as adding additional content dynamically onto the map, searching, on-demand zoom in/out, actual location, overlays, better mobile device support, etc.  Google Maps is one of the leading online free map services that many web users like you are using daily. Today, with globalization of business many companies have offices all over the world. So it becomes a very natural request from your business users: can we put our business data on Google Maps so that we can easily see how our branch offices perform globally? Or in other words, can we place Google Maps inside our Cognos reports? Before we get to the answer, let’s first take a look whether this is even a technical possibility.
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Making the Most of IBM Information On Demand (IOD)

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It is that time of the year again! On October 23rd – 27th, IBM will be hosting its second annual Business Analytics Forum at IBM’s Information On Demand Conference in Las Vegas. This year’s docket includes over 200 Business Analytics sessions as well as 100’s of hands-on technical workshops. The topics will range from Business Analytics on the Cloud to to Business Analytics in Social Media, and much more in between. The presenters will include IBM’s best and brightest, as well as customers from organizations leading the way in Business Analytics. In addition to these presentations IBM also offers complimentary certification testing, industry specific birds-of-a-feather sessions to share experiences, and one-on-one executive visits.

The expansive content and learning opportunities at this event are very impressive. In previous years some of our customers have mentioned feeling overwhelmed and struggled to determine how to make the best use of their time. Here are a few quick tips to make the most out of this great opportunity Read more

NECUG Meeting Sept 22, 2011 Littleton, MA

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NECUG Meeting

September 22nd, 2011

Littleton, MA

Agenda

8:30 – 9:00 am Registration

9:00 am – 9:15 am Welcome and Introduction

9:15 – 10:00
am Dashboard Design Tips

(Featuring IBM Cognos 8.4 and a SQL Server Database)

Presenter(s): Greg Novotony, Architect, Enterprise Business Intelligence & Analytics

Greg will discuss best practices for designing dashboards and will build a stacked portal page on the fly.
(stacked, meaning one portal page nested inside another)The portal will have both horizontal and vertical tabs (allows user 1 point of entry for 30-40 pre-run reports) The underlying reports will be visually appealing (increases user adoption) and will include a combination of object types (list, crosstabs, charts, heatmaps,etc.)The underlying reports will be pre-run, but may include drill through links to more detailed data

10:00 – 10:45 am Automating Administration & the BI Life-Cycle

(Featuring MotioCI 2.1 & MotioPI 2.5)

Presenter(s): Adam Bonneau Senior Software Developer & Lead Feature Developer at Motio Duke University: BSE Civil Engineering, BS Economics, BA Public Policy, Honor Societies Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, & Chi Epsilon;

Founded in 1999, Motio is the leader and largest 3rd party Cognos software technology provider; building solutions targeted at automating and address standard Cognos process and challenges. All uniquely innovated (some weakly imitated) our solutions range from 100% and Complete BI Change Management, Automatic Report Testing, and Cognos Stress Testing, to Cognos Admin Utility Solutions, Mass Report Spec Analysis and Documentation, and BI Output Storage and Retention.  With thousands of software customers, ranging from mom-and-pop to Fortune 10, and the largest Cognos customers in the world, our applications are designed to scale, address broad BI challenges, and deliver to any organization seeking better managed and more effective BI.

10:45 am Break

11:00 am Data Virtualization

Presenter(s): Jason Hull

11:45 am IBM??

12:00 pm Lunch Networking

12:45 – 1:30 pm “Ask The Experts” Round Table

1:30-2:15 pm Predictive Analytics with IBM SPSS Modeler

Presenter(s): Daniel Hess, Jing Yin, Technical Consultant at The Ironside Group

(Featuring IBM SPSS Modeler 14)

Jing will discuss how organizations can take advantage of the predictive power of data mining to automate decisions to achieve business goals and deliver better results. The presentation will include a demo session to show how to use IBM SPSS Modeler to build a data mining stream to quickly identity trends behind the data. The demo will highlight on some of the advanced features of SPSS Modeler including automated data preparation and modeling, result visualization, IBM Cognos integration etc.

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Ironside Helps Clients Save Money on IBM S&S & C10 Upgrade

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For many years, Cognos clients and users have only had the ability to renew their subscription and support for their licenses through IBM at full entitled price.  As of April 2011, IBM has authorized Ironside to resell S&S directly to users, very often at a discounted price.  Many organizations have begun to take advantage of discounts and credits by being cognizant of the start and end dates of their S&S cycles.  By keeping an open dialogue with Ironside we have ensured that our clients will have every opportunity to save money on their S&S and trade-up purchases. Read more

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Predictive Analytics with IBM SPSS

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SPSS Predictive AnalyticsIBM Business Analytics software is designed to deliver complete, insightful, and accurate information for decision makers to make more effective decisions. As part of this portfolio, IBM SPSS Predictive Analytics software specializes in predictive analytics which organizations can rely on to predict future outcomes based on patterns found in historical data. Organizations in almost all industries of every size can benefit from the IBM SPSS technology to provide clear and actionable insight into current performance as well as use the information to drive better outcomes for future business. While Business Intelligence can help to monitor the current and past performance of the business operation, Predictive Analytics can answer questions on why the business is performing in a certain manner and how it can be improved in the future. Read more