Gartner predicts that 30% of all BI will be consumed on mobile devices by 2013.  With the amount of interest in mobile BI and those kinds of bold predictions you would think it would be easy to understand the options available.  It is not.  There are a lot of things to consider when deciding what mobile BI tool and operating system fits for your organization:

I had the opportunity to attend the Cognos 10 Launch event in Richmond, Virginia earlier this week (2/10/2011).  It was an educational session and it was also nice to see such a large turnout of Cognos users in the Richmond community.

Gartner recently released an updated version of the Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. One quick glance at the new Magic Quadrant and you’ll notice there are a whopping 19 entries this year, with 8 companies making the prestigious leader quadrant.  When compared to the 4 leaders in the Data Integration magic quadrant and 6 in the data warehouse space it is clear there is a lot happening in the world of Business Intelligence.

In the spirit of the New Year I thought I would make some predictions on what I think will happen in the Business Intelligence space in 2011.  Companies have an overwhelming amount of data to mine, and with maturing BI tools, cheap processing power and low cost storage aplenty it should allow companies to quickly advance their analytical capabilities in the coming year.

I had the opportunity to attend IOD this week (10/25/2010) and was able to attend the Cognos 10 launch event in person.  I learned quite a bit about the product and wanted to share my first impressions of the new release.

Building metadata models using Framework Manager can be a simple or complex one.  It all depends on the underlying database structure and how relevant it is to the reporting that is required.  Regardless of the data model complexity there are a number of best practices that should be followed when building models using Framework Manager:

1. Never allow Cognos to create joins automatically when importing data sources.   Cognos rarely chooses correctly and this inevitably creates future rework.

The Cognos Transformer tool is extremely powerful and does a great job of producing cubes via the transformer interface.  The problem I have with Transformer, and the Cognos 8 BI suite, is that it provides no easy way to automatically refresh cube data on a regular schedule.  At every client I visit, they want to refresh cubes regularly for use in Analysis Studio.  It sounds easy enough but when you start to dig deeper you realize that it is not included in the out of the box Cognos functionality. Surprisingly a custom solution is required to achieve this. After each release I continue to wonder why IBM does not include cube refresh functionality within the Cognos Connection scheduling tool.  It seems like it would be the perfect place and relatively simple given how robust the scheduling options are.

What is Report Bursting?

Bursting reports is the technique used to run a report once and divide the results for distribution to unique recipients.  

Advantages

There can be significant performance improvements by using report bursting.  For example, if you need to distribute a sales report 50 sales persons with the results separated by the salesman you have two options. You could run the report 50 times filtering the report differently (by salesperson) for each run or you could run the report once and burst the results to each salesperson. By running the report once and bursting the results, the database is only hit once instead of 50 times.

I’m a IBM Certified Cognos developer who is just learning Business Objects.  With many years of Cognos experience and just a few weeks with BO  I must be clearly biased towards Cognos and I probably am.  So with my bias why even write something comparing the two technologies?  Why not?  As a consultant I am always learning new technologies and being asked to compare and contrast them. Given the number of different tools offered by both vendors, I think the comparison is best done at the individual tool level.  It is also important to note that I have not used all the tools Business Objects has to offer.

Web Intelligence vs. Report Studio/Query Studio

When doing an upgrade from Cognos 7 to Cognos 8 there are two options, use the Cognos provided migration tools to do a "lift and shift" or rebuild all frameworks and reports from scratch.  Clients want to choose the "lift and shift" option and for good reason.  It seems like it would go faster, require less work and be more cost effective.  Is it really?

The lift and shift method may provide quicker results, but does it really require less work and is it more cost effective?  In my experience the answer is almost always no.  Quality suffers, best practices are not followed, and perhaps most importantly, any mistakes made in the old version are replicated.  When evaluating the approach, the following things should be considered:

• How many catalogs does the legacy environment have?  Most of my clients have, over time, accumulated multiple catalogs that are essentially the same but have been tweaked to meet a specific reporting need.  In the new framework world, these redundant catalogs should be merged into one version of the truth.  If this is not done, maintenance costs skyrocket and administration and code promotion becomes a serious pain point.
•  Best practices - The Cognos catalog migration tools do not move data into a framework that follows best practices.  Only two layers of abstraction are provided requiring additional development work to get to a 3 layer model. If these changes are made to the framework after migration, all migrated reports will likely need to be modified to support the changes.
• Cardinality between query subjects may not be accurate after a migration.
• Many of the new features of the Studios are not leveraged during the migration leaving reports looking stale.

So if the conclusion is to stay away from a straight migration using the provided migration tools then is there a place or reason to use the migration tools at all?  Simple stated - yes.  The migration tools can be of tremendous help when doing the upfront planning and analysis for the upgrade.  In the case where documentation of the legacy reporting environment is limited or non existent, quickly migrating catalogs gives you an easy way to graphically view relationships between query subjects as well as better understand the data at hand.  If there are multiple catalogs to review, having them available in Framework Manager makes comparisons and merge analysis much more straightforward.  Without question, using this information as input to the future state framework design jumpstarts the upgrade and adds value immediately.