Over 23.000 companies with thousands of employees each - they are the strength of IBM Cognos, one of the most popular Business Intelligence solutions in the market. They benefit from powerful BI capabilities which they turn into bettered and more efficient decisions.

IBM Cognos has been designed to address more and more complex needs of the business which requires timely information to answer quickly most of business questions. Thank to versatile solution which IBM Cognos definitely is, they can look at their business from different perspectives at the same time and - therefore - get a significantly deeper insight in the problems. However, Cognos by IBM isn't only what people used to call a traditional Business Intelligence. It's a wider solution which - thank to extraordinary capabilities - takes the former BI onto a new level of usability. The most crucial capabilities are predictive analytics, real time monitoring, collaboration, scenario modeling, and planning.

IBM Cognos - capabilities

Timeliness and accuracy of data - IBM Cognos query and reporting capabilities facilitate and accelerate the decision making process due to system's high performance and simplicity. Easy to use and intuitive interface allow all types of users - from occasional "reporters", to professional report designers - accomplish their goals quickly and without paying any special efforts.

The situation with IBM Cognos analytic capabilities is more or less similar. The provided tools address the needs of end-users of different levels of technical advancements. Common is the fact that all of them can quickly find the point of view they look for and - thereupon - bring out the point of their searches. Beginning and occasional users can quickly gather the required information by easily analyzing the chosen volumes. As for the more advanced practitioners, IBM Cognos provides quite a wide set of "what if" and predictive analytics capabilities.

Decision making support content wouldn't be complete if not the dashboard capabilities. Once Cognos Business Intelligence is tightly connected to other products of the family (Real-time Monitoring, Cognos TM1, and SPSS), dashboards allow users to turn insights into actions, information into decisions.

Once the decisions are made, there is a need to control them. Once the goals are aligned to the strategy, it's necessary to verify whether they are in practice they way they have been expected before. Thereupon, IBM Cognos provides comprehensive scorecard capabilities. They allow the decision-makers to answer the question about the general condition of the organization. If anything goes wrong, managers can quickly communicate the scorecard findings to lower levels of company hierarchy and ordinate looking for the opportunities to erase the mistakes and improve the situation. However, the faster the decisions about improvements are introduced, the better to their efficiency. Thereupon, beside wide scorecards capabilities, IBM Cognos offers real-time monitoring. Its goal is to provide decision-makers with the most timely information about company performance. Thereupon, real-time monitoring covers a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which can be checked all day and all night long. What it results in is shortened time needed for reacting to negative trends.

Once separate analytics often take a lot of time, statistics accelerate the most common processes. The capabilities included in IBM Cognos, which IBM SPSS Statistics Engine is a base for, help bringing out the core of reporting and analysis. They automate at least a part of conclusion making process turning it faster. As a consequence, better and more efficient.

IBM Cognos BI also provides such tools as: Cognos Mobile, Cognos Active Report, Cognos Mashup Service, and Cognos for Microsoft Office.
These are the most common extensions to standard BI capabilities palette. In most of cases, they allow to use the Business Intelligence system anytime and anywhere they need to. What's more, they can do it anyhow, what means that they can choose the most easily understandable form. However, individualism is thought to be a melody of the past, these days. Thereupon, every organization software is strictly obliged to support cooperation. IBM Cognos isn't anyhow different. Thank to its collaborative BI capabilities, different users of the organization may use the same resources at the same time. Hence, working in teams (crucial in today's business) can be meaningfully more efficient as different persons don't interrupt each others. The final result is growing efficiency followed with unification across the organization.

IBM Cognos - summary

The popularity of IBM Cognos in Business Intelligence market isn't accidental. It's a comprehensive solution which - supplied with other products of the IBM family - address almost every organization's need. Once followed with all time support from the vendors' agents, IBM Cognos is considered the best option by many organizations. What they are provided with is a complex Business Intelligence platform which supports all everyday business' needs - queries, reporting, analytics, dashboarding, scorecarding, and real-time monitoring. Additionally, it's supplied with additional capabilities - statistic insights, Business Intelligence extensions, and collaborative BI what makes the platform even "more complete" what is what the customers look for.

IBM Cognos resources

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/ - all the needed information, even if prepared from subjective point of view, is placed on the IBM website. Here's everything about Cognos as a Business Intelligence and as a Performance Management tool, descriptions of separate products, and relatively a lot in details. Simultaneously, there also is a contact form so that one could quickly supply his knowledge with specialists' answers to his questions.

Youtube videos which IBM specialists presenting their point of view on Cognos in. They pay all attention to the newest - 10th - release of the platform, explaining what is changed and why. They introduce also the audience to the basis of Cognos and its multiple appliances. Additionally, specialists' words are illustrated with screenshots of the solution so that one could simultaneously realize what Cognos looks like.

http://www.facebook.com/ibmcognossoftware - it may seem a bit funny or unprofessional, but Facebook is a medium which more and more of us use every day. Thereupon, IBM also decided to start its own channel devoted to Cognos solution and publishes there every news and event connected with the solution.

http://www.cognos-bi.info - even though there is quite a lot of different official sources of knowledge on IBM Cognos, the most useful advice often is hidden deep inside. The blog is devoted to the best Cognos practices - diverse tips, tutorials and information.