Envisn's IBM Cognos Blog

July 2019, by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Nearly every Cognos environment that’s been operational for a period of time has a large number of scheduled reports. These reports are essential to managing day to day performance against operational goals, and thus, need to be regularly produced. Often, the longer a given report has been in use the more people rely on it to be available when needed. Over time clusters of key reports are put in place for each functional area of the organization, and if managed well people get what they need when it’s needed.

June  2019, by Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

This blog is different from any other we have done. All of our previous blogs have been about Cognos Analytics on subjects that help Cognos administrators learn more about what can be done with access to everything in the Content Store. This blog is focused is on how we have been able to do that.

May  2019, by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Of all the areas of Cognos administration the one that appears to cause the most anxiety is security. This likely is the result of the fact that there are so many ways that security can be applied within Cognos Analytics. The distinction between groups and roles, for example, and how they each should be used is one of the least understood aspects of correctly applying security in Cognos. Yet doing this correctly is the cornerstone of any successful implementation of security in Cognos.

April  2019, by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Most institutional data used for reporting purposes comes from one or more data warehouses which are typically aggregations of internal transaction systems like SAP, Oracle, etc. But more frequently today an equally large portion comes from external sources. This could be vendors/ suppliers, government sources, customers, etc. In fact, this segment of data is typically growing at a much faster rate than internal sources as companies need for this data becomes critical to just in time supply chain management as well as quality control.

March  2019, by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

Triggers are widely used across many Cognos environments, particularly larger ones where reports are often scheduled based on one or more dependent events being completed. These events are typically things external to Cognos but required by it to complete a scheduled event. An example would be to run reports based on the successful update of the data warehouse. If the reports were simply run on a time schedule it’s possible that the reports could kick off before the data warehouse update was completed rendering the reports useless and requiring a rerun. Tying report execution to a successful update of the data warehouse insures that they will only be run once for a given cycle.

December  2018, by Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

In this second part of this blog subject we are going to focus on some less traditional areas of impact analysis in Cognos Analytics but no less important. These are:

• Object dependency
• Data lineage
• Object failure history

October 2018, by Elwood Philbrick, Envisn, Inc.

Administering Cognos Analytics is mostly about managing change. Changes to reports, packages, models, security, triggers, schedules, etc. are ongoing. Doing this successfully requires being able to accurately understand how planned changes will impact the objects in your Content Store. Knowing the precise impact of planned changes is critical because if you don’t get this right the change process can be painful. Because objects requiring change are not identified or objects are incorrectly identified as needing change. Fixing them is difficult because you may not even know what’s been changed.

February 28, 2018 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

In the first couple of blogs in this subject series we covered the major elements of the Cognos metadata universe and how to harness them for use. And one of our goals was to be able to access metadata from any of the four major groups and be able to link when appropriate with data from any other group. This is possible because we have all of the metadata from the groups in an XML database which is a virtual image of the Cognos Content Store.

December 13, 2017 by Rick Ryan, Envisn, Inc.

This blog article is the first in a series of articles on this subject. It’s not something that has been explored in depth to our knowledge and deserves move coverage. Our focus will be on the breadth and depth of Cognos metadata, and more importantly, how it can be used to address issues that Cognos administrators and developers face on a daily basis. These will be in depth examples of Cognos Metadata and its use.

January 5, 2017 by Paul Hausser, Envisn, Inc.

With Watson having become the point of the IBM marketing spear an obvious question being raised by many Cognos administrators is how one relates to the other. Our focus here is on that audience primarily because there is a perception of an overlap between the two, and if there is, what is the extent of the overlap? Here we’ll try to address both questions.