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3 Ways to Modernize Your Cognos Environment

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The last several years have represented an interesting journey for organizations and teams leveraging Cognos for analytics. During that time, visual data discovery tools have made a significant impact. However, as of late, we have seen the pendulum swing back to concepts introduced by enterprise BI tools long ago.¹ What’s old is new again.

When these new tools arrived, they challenged both the status quo and what many of us saw as an ideal solution to the localized, ungoverned, manually-intensive, and often error-prone data manipulation (i.e. “shadow analytics”) processes of the past. If we think back to the dawn of the modern business intelligence age in the mid 1990’s, we realize that these challenges are what tools like Cognos were developed to solve. Read more

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Five Essential Capabilities of the Competitive Data-Driven Enterprise

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If your organization is seeking to better manage its information as a corporate asset that is to be valued and capitalized, you’re likely focused on implementing programs that will catalyze measurable business results from mountains of business information that may be the product of the last decade or more of digital transformation initiatives. Read more

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A Marriage of Modes: Unifying Multi-Platform Analytics Ecosystems

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One size does not fit all. Try as they might, there is not a single BI platform that can offer every capability that users require. With organizational complexity increasing, and the growing demand for self-service analytics, it has become commonplace, even recommended, for organizations to maintain multiple BI platforms to meet the needs of people in diverse roles with differing needs across the organization. Read more

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Data & Analytics Governance: Change is Happening. Are You Ready?

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Governance is the ongoing process of creating and managing processes, policies, and information. This includes strategies, processes, activities, skills, organizations, and technologies for the purpose of accelerating business outcomes. It also involves creating organizations, roles and responsibilities to perform this management. In our experience, many organizations address governance once and often without completing the necessary tasks. Organizations that excel in data and analytics governance continuously manage the process on an ongoing basis. Read more

Building a Bridge Between Business and IT

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You walk down the long hall, and tentatively knock on the side of a cubicle, just loud enough to be heard over the din of keyboard clicking. The occupant of the chair slowly spins around. “Yes?”

“So, um, I was wondering about that report I requested…”

“Yes I remember” comes a flat reply. “We’re still looking into it, I’ll let you know in a week, OK?”

The chair spins back around, keyboard sounds resume. Read more

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Take Pitney Bowes Data for a Test Drive

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Last week, Ironside’s partner Pitney Bowes, issued a press release announcing the global launch of its new Software & Data Marketplace.  We believe that accessibility to Pitney Bowes data will be valuable to our clients as they will be able to source and process data from multiple providers in the same applications, leading to easier analysis and collaboration of data points. Read more

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How Mature is Your Data?

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It seems like data and analytics is on the top of everyone’s agenda these days. If you are accountable for providing any type of reporting, business analytics, or predictive analytics, then you are aware of the demands being placed on your time, data, and systems. If you are an executive, you are probably asking questions about your business and waiting for answers and insights. Read more

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Preserving Retail Profits with Data-Driven Loss Prevention

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Ironside’s Greg Bonnette was featured in NRF’s Magazine, STORES, in the article titled “Mapping Crime Risks: Location data helps specialty retailer minimize loss and maximize sales.” written by Liz Parks in September 2017. Read more

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Be A Data Champion

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Being the sole data champion within your organization can present difficulties when you’re vying for limited company resources and attention from the “powers that be.” No doubt, you may find the role to be frustrating at times. Yet you may also find the role to be extremely rewarding, because it gives you a great deal of responsibility and offers you with the opportunity to achieve the goal that every data champion aspires to: Gaining user buy-in of the data insights you’ve unlocked. Read more

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Advanced Analytics for the Biopharmaceutical Industry

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For players in the biopharmaceutical space, it is becoming increasingly clear that advanced analytics can be of enormous assistance in solving many of the unique challenges the industry faces. To understand the extent of the impact that advanced analytics can make, it’s first necessary to examine how healthcare in the US has undergone a major transformation over the past decade.

First, there’s the presence of managed care. It puts pressure on pharmaceutical companies to provide stronger evidence of efficacy and safety, reduce costs of drug development and healthcare in general, and provide personalized care by targeting patient groups that are most likely to benefit from treatments and least likely to suffer adverse events. Read more