What is Cognos?

What is Cognos?

Developed by IBM, Cognos is a business intelligence reporting tool which provides a scalable, self-service analytical solution to cater to the business needs. Its highly interactive nature makes it a go-to tool for any enterprise as it creates user-friendly dashboards and reports.

Definition

As stated earlier, Cognos is a performance management business intelligence tool of IBM which allows both technical, and non-technical employee in any organization to extract, and analyze data and create interactive dashboards which could enable the business to make relevant key decisions.

The Cognos tool is a combination of a plethora of different products which allows communication with various third-parties such as relational databases, SAP, and so on.

Understanding Cognos

Initially started as a consulting company in 1969 by Alan Rushforth and Peter Glenister, Cognos moved to software sales later on. On January 31, 2008, IBM acquired Cognos and maintained its software suite legacy.

It is a powerful business intelligence tool which is used for data mining, analysis of the data, event monitoring, and metric selection for visualization. For any business to stay ahead in the market, it gives them a powerful analytics medium to predict market trends and take appropriate actions beforehand.

How Cognos does make working so easy?

It is a business intelligence tool which makes allows the creation of interactive dashboards to make informed business decisions as it has the capability to predict the changes in the market beforehand. Nowadays, almost every company uses Cognos for their analytical tasks as taking key business decisions at the right time is necessary to survive in this every challenging market.

Cognos has certainly made working easy for the enterprises, and the organizations, and here are some of the ways how it does so.

• It is powered by Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning which enables it to make future predictions, and create intelligent dashboards.
• It uses pattern detection property to discover hidden patterns in the data which otherwise could be unheard or is not expected in normal circumstances.
• One of the key features of Cognos is its ability to create interactive dashboards in multiple formats catering to business needs. It enables the stakeholders to analyze the charts the way they would want and helps in the decision making process.
• Natural Language processing is the way to extract information from raw text and make intelligent predictions. Cognos using natural-language powered AI which assists the users to get intelligent responses to the questions posed by them.
• Manual tasks require time and effort. Cognos eliminates manual intervention by automating the data-preparation process through its built-in intelligence system.

What can you do with Cognos?

Cognos allows the creation of intelligent interactive dashboards to make informed business decisions. Its system is Machine Learning and AI enabled which automates the process of data creation, and analysis and also enables users to get relevant answers to their questions.

Working with Cognos

Cognos allows making interactive dashboards for the business to make intelligent decisions. Some of its basic components are –

• The Query Studio is used for writing simple queries, and also for answering business questions through the service reports.
• Next is the Cognos Connection which ensures that the suite consists of all the functions.
• The charts, graphs, lists, which is required by the management is prepared by using the Report Studio.
• In order to notify about the real-time enterprise events, the Event Studio is used.
• The Analysis Studio which consists of the OLAP operations helps in analyzing the trends, events, detect anomalies, and so on.

Advantages of Cognos

Cognos is the go-to tool for any business to make key business decisions. There are several advantages to using Cognos.

• Data Preparation

Files of different formats like CSV, spreadsheets could easily be accessed and uploaded. It also helps in finding the relevant data sources with the help of its intelligent system that uses Natural Language and also automates the process of combination of different data sources.

• Data Exploration

The data could be visualized and reported in a professional manner through Cognos. Additionally, its intelligent features allow plotting the correct chart for a particular business problem. Moreover, the geospatial features are also embedded in the dashboard.

• Data Sharing

Once the data is prepared and explored, it could be shared over different platforms or in a cloud. It also enables users to report subscriptions, and different charts could be combined to create a story using various features like voiceovers, overlays, etc.

Required Cognos Skills

Cognos is a tool, and thus there are no technical pre-requisites to master it. However, one must possess proper data intuition, and understand the data well enough to ensure correct data is being used to make business decisions.

Why should we use Cognos?

Cognos should be used to make interactive intelligent dashboards, automate the process of data preparation, and analyze the data by plotting the correct chart for a particular business problem.

Scope

It has a huge scope in the analytical eco-space, and it depends and its scope depends on the scalability of its usage. It has three options –

• The Trial version of the Premium edition.
• The Premium edition, which has the full capabilities of Cognos.
• The Enterprise edition, which is mostly used in big industries as it meets their needs in a particular environment.

Why do we need Cognos?

Any enterprise, or an individual needs Cognos to automate the Data analysis, and visualization task. It also helps in predicting the future trends which could ensure in taking a key business decision.

Who is the right audience for learning Cognos technologies?

Anyone who is interested in data visualization to make intelligent decisions should learn Cognos as it is easy to use, and provides a whole lot of features based on the needs.

How this technology would help you in career growth?

It would open the doors for any professional in the analytical space as Cognos is an important tool to learn because of its multiple usage and acceptance by different organizations.

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