developerWorks: Leah, thank you for joining us. With IBM's recent acquisition of Cognos, we are very excited to have you join us to talk about the IBM Cognos 8 platform and capabilities for performance management. Tell us a little bit about Cognos.

Leah MacMillan: The IBM Cognos 8 BI platform has been designed to be the foundation for our performance management capabilities, applications and solutions. This modern, open platform has enabled rapid development for a broad range of BI and performance management capabilities – capabilities that help organizations to answer the three questions that help to improve business performance:

• How are we doing?
• Why?
• And what should we be doing?

These capabilities include business itelligence capabilities – such as reporting, analysis, dashboards and scorecards – as well as planning, budgeting, forecasting – all built on an open platform.

dW: So when you talk about an open platform, what does this mean?

LM: Built from the ground up as a Web services-based SOA, IBM Cognos 8 BI is, by nature, open – with out-of-the-box support for an organization’s existing data sources, security systems, portals, application servers and more. With IBM Cognos 8 BI, an organization can leverage their current investment in the infrastructure they have already implemented, for example, tapping into the many transactional, relational, multi-dimensional, flat, legacy or modern data sources that already exist.

dW: What is the significance of the new release?

LM: We are very pleased to have released the latest version of our performance management platform and capabilities. IBM Cognos 8 BI v3 includes continued innovations designed to address real-world needs – diverse user communities across the organization, and the ability to more easily support them. We have provided a number of enhancements that meet the needs of the various people in the organization that engage in performance management – from the executive, to the business analyst, all the way to the casual user. We’ve also made the platform and capabilities easier to manage and deploy, with enhancements for the data modeler, the system administrator, and BI professional.

dW: Let’s talk a little bit about some of these communities and how you help them. You mentioned the BI professional – let’s start with them.

LM: First off, the BI professional is an important persona – as he or she is often the one creating business intelligence reports, scorecards, dashboards, and so on, for users throughout the organization. Cognos 8 BI offers a single report authoring environment for this community – enabling them to author once, but deploy anywhere – so they can meet the diverse needs of the user communities – delivering information through a portal, via automated reports in email, on a dashboard, or to a mobile device like the BlackBerry. Essentially, users can receive information how, when and where they need it. This flexibility is a necessity to ensure pervasive adoption in an organization.

A BI professional or report author, however, has traditionally been subject to having backlogs of reports. Over the years, we have increasingly focused on providing users with the ability to find fast answers to business questions through easy, self-service capabilities. We further enhanced the level of self-service with this release by providing a new express authoring mode to allow the financial analyst community to easily author and publish financial, statement style reports – decreasing the burden on BI professionals. And, we’ve improved the ease of which users can manage their own view of the information through the creation of multi-dimensional cubes, using an enhanced version of Cognos Transformer.

dW: And, how do data modelers benefit from this solution?

LM: Data modelers and analysts have their own unique pains and solutions. IBM Cognos 8 BI v3 includes best practices in the data modeling environment through a "Model Advisor," as well as several enhancements that help ease their tasks and make them more efficient.

dW: And you also mention that system administrators can benefit from this release – how is that?

LM: New with IBM Cognos 8 BI v3 is a snapshot of system health with live insight into key metrics of system performance that will help to proactively manage deployment. IBM Cognos 8 v3 also delivers simplified upgrade management to help handle large volumes of reports, and to test out the system when there are environmental changes.

dW: And where can we find out more about IBM Cognos 8 BI v3?

LM: We have a number of assets for the data modeler, the system administrator, and BI professionals on the Web site.

dW: Thank you, Leah, for meeting with us and helping us understand how IBM Cognos 8 v3 will bring new capabilities to our practitioner community.

Resources

Learn

• IBM welcomes Cognos: IBM officially welcomes Cognos to its Information On Demand family of business optimization solutions.
  
  
• Learn more about Cognos 8 Business Intelligence capabilities.
  
  
• Learn more about Cognos 8 Performance management capabilities.
  
  
• Cognos 8 v3 demo: Watch a demo of new features in Cognos 8 BI v3 in three major areas.
  
  
• Value from the Cognos 8 platform: This white paper describes how IBMCognos 8 addresses key questions regarding performance management.
  
  
• Supporting more user communities with Cognos 8 BI: In this white paper, learn about new features of special interest to an expanded user community for business intelligence, including express authoring, improved transformer capabilities, scorecard portlets, metric-intelligent diagrams, and self-service strategy management.
  
  
• More targeted information with Cognos 8 BI: Learn how Cognos 8 brings you the right data, modeled in a way that makes sense for your business. This white paper brings you the details.
  
  
• IBM Information On Demand: Learn how you can set an agenda to manage your data and content and pull together trusted information that cuts across diverse silos, and also gain valuable insights to optimize your business.
  
  
• developerWorks Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence zone: Grow your skills on IBM data warehousing and business intelligence products with articles, tutorials, links to documentation, and more.
  
  

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Table of contents

• Resources
• About the author
• Comments

Next steps from IBM

• Try: Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
• Demo: Video: Cognos 8 BI
• Webcast: A smarter way to successful SOA: Information as a trusted strategic asset
• Briefing: Information on Demand
• Buy: Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

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