Active Reporting considerations

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I recently attended the IBM Cognos Report Studio: Author Active Reports training and found the session very informative and an essential component for any organisation developing an interactive, mobile reporting strategy. My thoughts are focused on the ability to integrate a mobile reporting strategy within a broader information Management strategy, listing the benefits and challenges of bringing this to fruition.

Benefits

  • Deploying reports to a device is very simple and can be scheduled at any time
  • Basic Active reports can be generated quickly
  • It is a much needed tool set in the IBM Cognos suite and interactive reports can be accessed outside the organisation seamlessly
  • Active reporting is critical to disseminate information across the organisation providing users with a high degree of interactivity
  • There is a free download of the IBM Cognos Active Report 10.1.1 Cookbook http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/reporting/active_report/page593.html which is a must read

Challenges

  • Existing report studio reports will need to be replicated into a mobile Active Report (a copy of the existing report with modifications to enable mobile compatibility is required)
  • If your existing report has prompts they will not work, connections and controls will need to be established
  • Drilling up, to assist with navigation and the user experience is very cumbersome and the creation of breadcrumbs is very time consuming. Drilling down can be done easy but the ability to get back to the summary data is more difficult
  • Developing visually appealing interactive reports does take time and without in depth knowledge off report studio, development will take significantly longer
  • The Trade-off between initiating a formal active reporting project versus integrating active reporting into future projects must be considered

Overall, active reporting is a much need tool for the University that can be quickly deployed with maximum impact. Existing or new reports, that fall into the categories of highly used (based on report executions), strategic in nature (used for senior executive meetings) and dynamic in nature (frequently changing) would be worthwhile candidatesfor active reports, but use caution if you are trying to convert a complex report as I have found it is much easier to start from scratch.

I would like to hear the how your institution is deploying mobile reporting and any challenges being experienced.

Craig Napier

 

COGNOS Tips & Tricks – Content Store

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Accessing users ‘My Folders’

If you have ever been involved in front line support activities for a COGNOS implementation with multiple end users you will likely have been asked to fix/review a report sitting in a users my folders.

Having worked with the COGNOS software for many years I (and my colleagues here at UOW) had always undertaken the laborious task of accessing a users ‘my folder’ through the IBM COGNOS Administration portal.

This task was very tedious having to navigate to the security tab then either traversing the security structure or searching for a user. Once there unfortunately you were still unable to open the report and therefore needed to copy the reports back to an accessible location. Open/fix and copy back….I could go on but I think you get the picture, what was essentially a 2 minute job often blew out to be much longer.

We recently discovered that you can obtain a direct link for navigating and editing user my folders through COGNOS connection.

Unfortunately the process to obtain this link the first time starts along the same lines as above.

Using COGNOS 10:

  1. Launch
  2. IBM COGNOS Administration
  3. Security tab
  4. Navigate to or Search for user
  5. Click user
  6. Enter ‘My Folder’ folder
  7. Select ‘Set Properties (from the top right)
  8. Click ‘View the search path, ID and URL’ (From the Right)
  9. Copy Default Action URL into new browser window

This should take you to the users ‘my folder’ in a window that you have full control as an administrator and can open/edit/rename reports.  This is also very handy when attempting to edit or create schedules within users my folder as schedules will not be maintained when copying reports.

You will also notice from this view you can navigate your user structure through the breadcrumb links. If you select the top level security breadcrumb and save this URL as a favourite it will make you’re my folder navigation tasks much simpler in the future.

This article may be a pleasant surprise to some whilst others may have been using this method for years and can not believe we have only just stumbled over it.

For those that fall into the first category, your welcome hopefully it saves you some precious time in the future.

For those that fall into the second category I am sure you have many more tips and tricks to share and we would encourage you to post these in the comments section below.

Thank-you for reading this article we should have a new posting going up within the month of February on COGNOS active reports.

If you would like to request a particular topic for an upcoming article of have your own COGNOS tips that you would like to share please leave them in the comments section below.

2012 IBM Information on Demand BI Conference – Las Vegas 21-25 October

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From the moment I landed in Las Vegas to the moment I left the USA I was in information overload.

The conference was super sized with 12000 attendees and 1600 sessions to choose from hosted in the massive Mandalay Bay Convention Centre.

The key focus technologies were Big Data, The Cloud and Watson, and the key application area was Health. Higher Education was not well represented at the conference.

IBM is working with the US Government to increase the “bang for buck” for each health dollar spent in an attempt to meet the tsunami of demand that the US Health System will be placed under over the next 20 years, due to the aging Boomer generation.

Big Data in Health, not only covers the vast number of patient transactional records being laid down on various databases by clinicians but also the enormous quantities of device data that  are beginning to be generated for each patient fitted with health devices, for example heart monitors. 

The Cloud is viewed as the place where Big Data will be located, and searched, to produce highly distilled result sets which will be used locally for decision making. The concept is that The Cloud enables Big Data to be held in an environment that is massively scaleable with regard processing power and storage, as well as centrally available to stakeholders. All of the US patient transactional records for example could be held in The Cloud.

With Watson, IBM promise the next era of IT, not one of clever programs presenting information to human decision makers, but of cognitive engines which assist human decision makers by presenting other options and reviewing proposed options. The base knowledge to drive the cognitive engine will come from The Cloud and native language interaction with decision makers is already proven.  IBM see Watson as the basis for Clinician Assistance Software which will interact with the Clinician to assist them improve diagnosis and lower risk.

My take on all this, is that there is no such thing as a silver bullet when it comes to IT solutions. It is always matching appropriate technologies and approaches to business problems. However, each of Big Data, Cloud and Watson are useful technology sets, but in my opinion Watson is the one to watch, as Information Technology steps over from conventionally programmed systems to cognitively capable systems.

 

Library analysis paper now published in Library and Information Science Research

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I thought I would share some exciting news: our paper on the Library Cube has been published in “Library and Information Science Research”, which is a peer reviewed journal with an impact factor that qualifies for inclusion in the HERDC publication collection.

Read more at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2012.06.002

AAIR forum SIG 2012

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In July  I was lucky enough to attend the 2012 AAIR SIG forum: A new beginning in demanding times. This years forum was jointly hosted by RMIT and Victoria University and ran over 2 days.

It was great to see such a big turn out with over 100 delegates in attendance. I learnt a lot over the two days and was able to catch up with many of the universities in attendance to share our current projects, challenges and experiences.

The forum was broken into two steams – Load planning and business intelligence. I was more interested in the business intelligence stream.

Some of the key take aways included:

-  the importance and profile of BI teams is  continuing to grow in Australian universities

- BI teams are getting more executive support

- BI teams doing more than just transactional reporting and analysis

- BI teams are now creating scorecards and complex dashboards

- BI teams are being asked to do more with data such as Planning, forecasting, budgeting and predictive analytics

- BICC’s are becoming the standard way of implementing BI within universities

- data quality still proves to be an on going challenge for confidence in BI solutions

- building a self service analytical culture within universities continues to be challenging

In summary it was excellent to see how much progress has been made by all universities in the last 12 months. I look forward to seeing where everyone is at in another 12 months time.

For more information please see the official site below:

http://aair.org.au/pages/data-warehousing-and-business-intelligence

 

Regards

Brad

University of Wollongong advances learning with analytics

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IBM have done a case study on the BI solution at UOW that I thought I would share with you

UOW Case Study (PDF)

UOW Case Study (HTML)

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BI for Targeted Marketing, Demonstrating Value, and Driving Process Improvement

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Hi All

I thought I would post this article up which was written by our library department on how BI has helped reveal a very strong relationship between library usage and students academic performance.

Abstract
The University of Wollongong (UOW) has undertaken an innovative and collaborative research project to demonstrate the value that can be provided by academic libraries. The tool developed, the “Library Cube”, is a data warehouse linking student borrowing and use of electronic resources to students’ academic grades and demographic information. The project is different to other institutions’ efforts to link usage to student outcomes, in that the Library Cube is not a one-off research project, but is now an ongoing part of UOW’s systems and performance reporting and represents a fundamental shift in evaluating the student experience through the integration of discrete systems and datasets.

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IBM Business Analytics Forum 2012

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A number of staff from UOW attended the IBM Business Analytics Forum 2012 at Melbourne in March. We all had a great time at the conference and found it interesting, relevant and informative.

The main take aways from our perspective were
1) The new active report product in Cognos 10 and its application in the university environment (Although the import external data source functionality could muddy the one source of truth advocates )
2) The need for mobile integration for Business Intelligence.
3) The Big Data concept. How are we as universities harnessing this wealth of knowledge? UOW has started to investigate this but is not on the radar as a project for this year.
4) As usual data quality was a big issue I picked up on talking to the various delegates

A quick run down of how the conference played out:

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Gartner Business Intelligence and Information Management summit 21-22 February

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Damien and I had the opportunity to attend the Gartner Business Intelligence and Information Management summit 21-22 February at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition centre. The conference consisted of two full days of presentations and discussion workshops with leading analysts and researchers in the BI industry.

This conference confirmed our viewpoint in how advanced UOW is with our level of maturity in the BI space. I attended a session on the first day which discussed Gartner’s opinion on the 10 key points on maximising BI impact in an organisation. From this, I believe that the Performance Indicator Unit does well in all of the key points but extremely well with five points in particular.

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Data Warehousing: Kimball Vs Inmon

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 Which Data Warehousing Methodology is best? Which car is best? It depends!

I will briefly compare the main differences between Kimball and Inmon methodologies:

Feature Kimball Inmon
Operational Data Store (ODS) Yes Yes
ETL Yes Yes
Enterprise Data Model No Yes
Star Schema Datamarts Yes Yes[1]
Reconciliation No Yes
OLAP Yes Yes
Reporting Yes Yes
Agile Yes Yes

 [1] Inmon’s Corporate Information Factory advocates the user of star schema’s to build data marts.

Inmon’s main tenet is that an Enterprise Data Model is required to underpin a Corporate Data Warehouse and Kimball makes no such claim.  In reality, most large corporates replicate operational table structures and data regularly into an Operational Data Store (ODS) which is an approximate union of the data models from each operational system.  So in a Kimball shop the ODS approximates a rough Enterprise Data Model, thereby closing the gap on the perceived difference.  However, Inmon does stress the importance of reconciling the Data Warehouse back to source, whereas Kimball provides no such emphasis.

Both propose Star Schema Datamarts, business driven incremental development involving prototyping iterations (Agile) and report/query delivery from relational databases directly or via OLAP data repositories such as n-dimensional cubes.

Here at UOW, we utilise our ODS as a rough Enterprise Data Model, we reconcile our Kimball fact and conformed dimensions as required, and build data marts using star schemas and n-dimensional cubes, from which data is extracted using Cognos Bi tools and native SQL.