Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

If you author or consume business intelligence reports then you need to read Stephen Few’s post on “Simplicity versus Complexity – Design Goals” 

Our thoughts on this topic are simple – an effective map within a well designed report can achieve three important goals:

1)     Tame the complexity of the information in your report.

2)     Increase usability and user adoption of your report.

3)     Allow for faster and better business decisions to be made.

For those of you joining this series in progress (now a trilogy!) this article says why we believe consumer mapping solutions should not be used with enterprise BI.

In solid Boolean logic: NOT Cognos BI AND Google Maps.

Thus far we've covered maps as simple consumer visualizations versus as tools for data analytics, and thematic shading. In our recent webinar (which incidentally had almost 1,200 registrants... we may have hit upon an important topic...).

But I digress.

Ease of Authoring

In our recent webinar, the main point we wanted to get across was that for a map-enabled reporting initiative to succeed it needs to be driven by the report author, not by developers working with APIs. The professional report author needs to be empowered to add interactive maps as part of their natural content development workflow. The alternative results in ongoing higher costs, in both time and money, and reduced responsive to the businesses information needs.

Not good.

A couple of moving pictures to give you a sense of what the empowered Cognos report author can accomplish:

As always, let us know what you think.

 - co

Wow... so... that was neat...

This morning we conducted our IBM Marketed: Maps in Cognos Webinar.  We were excited a couple of weeks ago when we got the "green light" from Big Blue.  Last Tuesday we were nervous about the Feb.16 date as we felt we might not have the time to get the word out.  

Well, word got out... 

• 1179 registrants
• 400+ attendees
• Dozens and dozens of questions rolling in
• Oodles of request for the demo recording

BTW link for question submission and demo download web page: http://bit.ly/vantagemaps

SpotOn's key take-aways from the session:

• Looks like interest in this map-enable report is for real (duh)

Key take-aways for the attendees of the discussion:

1. Including maps in Cognos reports can add tremendous impact and business value to the information delivery;
2. Empowering the Cognos report author is the key to successful map integration;
3. You've made a large investing in IBM Cognos BI for important enterprise IT reasons, the integration approach must "fit" with the IBM Cognos architecture principles.

We talked about consumer versus enterprise maps as well, but I'll save those points for the ongoing mini-series.

If you tuned in, let us know what you thought.  Pretty certain we'll be running the webinar again in the near future.

Cheers!

co

Tell me if you have ever heard this statement before:

“Business Intelligence software allows users to make better business decisions.”

It may be the most over-used statement in the BI industry.

The concept sounds simple – give business users data, they will be better informed, and they will make better business decisions.  There's often a problem, however, at the report level. The report the IT department creates for a user tends not to meet the user’s needs.  Sometimes the report doesn’t offer enough information, sometimes it offers too much information, sometimes it’s too difficult to understand, and sometimes it just doesn’t appeal to the user.

Appeal?

That’s right, sometimes the look, feel, and unappealing nature of a report simply turns a user off. In turn, the report is offered to large numbers of users but few users actually consume the report. Would you rather look at a 9 page tabular report full of figures, or a map that gives you an immediate picture of how sales are in a particular region and the opportunity to dig for further details on that specific region? The data is the same in both cases, but the way it is presented to a user is significantly different.

A couple of weeks ago, Network World published an article on the top 5 innovation opportunities for CIO’s in 2011. On the second page of that list was ‘data visualization’. They pointed to data visualization as providing a different, more appealing, visual context. This means allowing users to view data in the form of a graph, chart, image, or map.

What Network World calls innovative is something we have been talking about and selling for years. But we still applaud the publication for recognizing that the visual appeal of a report matters. If organizations are truly striving for the ultimate goal of better business decisions, they need to start with making their reports more appealing to users.

In the first post of this series we touched on the fact that consumer mapping (i.e. Google Maps) is essentially about presentation.  Digging deeper, consumer mapping solutions put dots on maps and let you know if there is a clustering of dots.  A nice example of leveraging these capabilities is the public crime reporting site that has just been launched in the UK.

So picture this, you're the head of BI department supporting all IBM Cognos reporting initiatives in your organization.  Your CEO just came across the police.uk site and says "I gotta have me one of those... top priority!".  The project is in your lap and it's too late to point out that Mr CEO missed the £300,000 pricetag to develop his new vision.

Damage control - what do you need:

• Cognos API/Mashup Services developer - check.
• Google Maps - it's free, so check.  (uh-oh, we'll come back to this one...)
• Data... ah crap!  The warehouse doesn't have lat/long or detailed address data.  Data work in our future...

Executives ponder why your department is not "responsive to the business needs" - you spend hours on LinkedIn pondering the pros and cons of life as an independent BI consultant.

Here the kicker, the data you want is there; it's aggregated to the various geographies: country, state, zip, county, sales territory, etc.

The double-kicker, organizing and analyzing your Cognos report data at the appropiate geographical region level (like state or ZIP code) is going to have more immediate impact and value to the business than wading through 10,000 individual location points.  

Thematic shading, or coloring of regions, to compare high versus low performance is what were talking about here.  South-east versus north-west results.  Drilling down to a city level and understanding which zip or postal areas are driving business.  Using this information to focus your marketing efforts.

Now, BI Dude or Dudette, picture this scenario:

• CEO says, "Give me a map!"
• Three hours later, you deliver this:

Maybe no LinkedIn surfing for today...

IBM turns 100 years old this year.  To mark the occasion they produced this video that creatively reviews the company’s accomplishments.

Cognos was IBM’s largest acquisition in its 100 year history.  As a result, the world of business intelligence and business analytics will never be the same.  As the video shows, IBM was built on innovation and taking existing industries to new heights.  We expect nothing different when it comes to BI. 

We at SpotOn have enjoyed a successful and fulfilling partnership with IBM ever since the Cognos acquisition.  This includes being awarded the IBM CTO Innovation Award, the IBM Cognos Global ISV Technology Partner of the Year Award, and closing a number of large and influential deals together. 

Happy birthday IBM!  Keep on innovating – the world expects a lot from you.