The CIO and Analytics Strategy: Ironside’s Take

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CIO and IDG released the 2017 State of the CIO report this week. Their findings are useful not just for the CIO role in general but also for exploring the connection between the CIO and analytics initiatives. Looking at the report through the lens of data and analytics, I had three reactions to the survey results:

  1. CIOs should consider using analytics to drive business innovation, backing up their transformational and strategic activities with concrete resources.
  2. CIOs and line of business leaders should consider communicating even more and syncing expectations through data and analytics.
  3. CIOs should consider investing in a data and analytics roadmap to enable themselves as both business strategists and technicians.

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3 Reasons Your Data & Analytics Roadmap Isn’t Helping You Reach Your Goals

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Creating a data and analytics roadmap is an important first step in helping your organization utilize data to achieve growth, understanding, and action. But often we hear from clients that their roadmap isn’t leading them to their desired destination. While many are successful in laying out the technical requirements, identifying the path to business outcomes, and building the right foundation, they still find themselves unable to make sufficient progress towards their goals. Read more

Take a Value Based Approach to Your Analytics Platform Migration

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Analytics platform migrations and upgrades are among Ironside’s core competencies. We’ve been doing them since our inception, and we do a lot of them.

Here are four common pitfalls that we’ve seen organizations from a variety of industries suffer from during the process. Read more

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3 Reasons to Start Your Upgrade from Cognos BI to Cognos Analytics Right Now

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As we’ve mentioned before, as of April 2018 there will be limited extended support for Cognos 10.x. Sure, that sounds like a long time from now, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from my time in enterprise IT, it’s that making a change is like turning a battleship. You need to start actively planning for it and plotting your course way ahead of time to ensure everything runs smoothly. Read more

Defining An Analytics Strategy

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LEXINGTON, Mass., Dec. 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Ironside, a Boston-based data and analytics firm, just released an authoritative list of questions that they recommend business leaders try to answer now in planning for their analytics initiatives.

Today, it’s safe to say that the majority of businesses understand the value of analytics. They get that their data is important and that using it in the right way can have significant benefits. The problem, though, is that even though the business community as a whole acknowledges these facts, there’s still a lot of magical thinking around analytics tools and platforms out there. Read more

Navigating Tableau Conference 2016: An Interview with Crystal Meyers and Katelyn Tolbert

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We’re getting ready for Tableau Conference 2016 here at Ironside. With only a short time left until November 7th, our team is preparing for which parts of the conference they’re most excited to take in. And, more importantly, developing strategies for prioritizing where to spend their time. I got a chance to catch up quick with Crystal Meyers and Katelyn Tolbert, two of our Tableau-certified consultants, to hear what they’re looking forward to and get their perspectives on where people should be focusing at the conference. Read more

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Cognos Analytics Release 4: Most Compelling New Features

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As part of the accelerated release schedule initiated with the introduction of Cognos Analytics last December, IBM made the latest release, Cognos 11.0.4 aka Cognos Analytics Release 4, available on September 16th.

While each of the previous releases have included enhancements and new functionality, Cognos Analytics Release 4 is significant enough that we wanted to present an article to our community focusing on what we feel the most compelling new features are based the time we’ve spent exploring the updated platform. Read more

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Top New Features in Tableau 10

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Tableau 10 was released on August 15th, and it is quite an upgrade. I’ve been spending some time doing hands-on testing of the new version, and I’m excited to share some of the new features I’ve explored with you.

In addition to a new custom font, new color palettes, and new themes that make Tableau more beautiful and visually appealing than ever, Tableau 10 has made great strides in bringing some of the most widely requested features from past releases into reality for this one. I’m going to walk you through some of the ones we at Ironside find most compelling and explain what the practical impact of each one is on the overall functionality of Tableau. This article will cover the following new features: Read more

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Ironside and Tableau Partner to Power Data Discovery

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If modern business data is a river, then traditional enterprise business intelligence is a bucket. Sure, you can pull some valuable and reliable insights at regular intervals that will help you take the pulse of what’s going on day to day, but there’s a much larger percentage of valuable insight that’s just going to wash by. That’s why having a complementary data discovery strategy is so important: it helps you be where you need to be in that flood to catch what’s most relevant to your current business concerns. One of the ways Ironside is helping our clients get to this level of self-service flexibility is by becoming a Tableau partner. Read more

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Empowering Insight with Tableau: A Case for Self-Service Analytics

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Tableau’s powerful data discovery and visual analytics capabilities make it an ideal tool for enabling end users to achieve data driven insights at the speed of business.  It puts data in the hands of the business users who have the most to gain from it in an intuitive manner that allows for rapid visualization and actionable insight through self-service analytics. Read more