Tag: Cognos

IBM Vision 2015

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending IBM Vision 2015 at the Hilton Bonnet Creek in Florida. Perficient was a sponsor of the event. This was my first time attending IBM Vision, I have been to a number of the other IBM conferences, and I came away impressed. Unlike massive events such as Insight and IOD, Vision is quite small and intimate. At Vision, it is easy to interact with attendees and presenters and to get around to see all the exhibitors. It was great to be able to check back in with people to see what sessions they had enjoyed. This year, IBM Vision had five tracks into which the material was collected:

  • Financial and operational performance management
  • Sales performance management (SPM)
  • Financial close and disclosure management
  • Governance, risk, and compliance
  • Cloud based solutions for business insight

I chose to concentrate on presentations in the Sales Performance Management track.

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Think Better Business Intelligence

Everyone is guilty of falling into a rut and building reports the same way over and over again. This year, don’t just churn out the same old reports, resolve to deliver better business intelligence. Think about what business intelligence means. Resolve, at least in your world, to make business intelligence about helping organizations improve business outcomes by making informed decisions. When the next report requests land on your desk leave the tool of choice alone, Cognos in my case, and think for a while. This even applies to those of you building your own reports in a self-service BI world.

Think about the business value. How will the user make better business decisions? Is the user trying to understand how to allocate capital? Is the user trying to improve patient care? Is the user trying to stem the loss of customers to a competitor? Is the user trying find the right price point for their product? No matter what the ultimate object, this gets you thinking like the business person and makes you realize the goal is not a report.  Continue reading “Think Better Business Intelligence”

Business Intelligence – Implementation Challenges

Business Intelligence should help organizations improve business outcomes by making informed decisions. The problem is that Business Intelligence is the overarching term applied to the tools, technologies, and best practices that that supposedly help organizations make sense of data. Where should you start? What tools should you use? What are the best practices? How do you manage the mass of data flowing into your organization? To which buzzwords should you pay attention? Perficient’s Enterprise Information Solutions group helps organizations determine how to put business and intelligence back into Business Intelligence.
In previous posts, I looked at Business Intelligence and what it means today and Buiness Intelligence – Future trends. In this post, I look at implementation challenges and how they might be addressed. The current state of business intelligence and the future trends, present a significant set of challenges to organizations trying to improve and leverage the data they have. Perficient’s Enterprise Information Solutions Company Wide Practice helps organizations do just that. The challenges that organizations face fall into a number of key areas.

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