Description: Join IBM Cognos and Advanced IBM Business Partner, PerformanceG2, for a complimentary, three-hour IBM Cognos Midsize Business Analytics Virtual Summit.

Whether you are new to business analytics or have been using it for some time, the IBM Cognos Midsize Business Analytics Virtual Summit can show you how to transform insight into action for better business outcomes. This virtual summit is the first in a series of quarterly, interactive forums focused on reporting, analysis and planning solutions for midsize companies.

The session will include:
* Keynote address- “Why Should You Care About Business Analytics?”
* Customer session and live case study overview
* Business analytics workshop: IBM Cognos Express
* Virtual expo hall, an interactive exhibit area- connect with PerformanceG2 here with any Cognos Express questions

Learn more and register
 
 
Forum: New Intelligence
Dates: Thursday, March 11, 2010- Dallas, TX
Tuesday, March 16- Columbus, OH
Thursday, March 18- San Francisco
Time: 9:00 AM to 3:30 PM

 
Description: Join IBM and PerformanceG2 to learn how to transform your company’s information into a strategic asset to optimize business performance. Learn first hand how IBM is changing the game by providing leading edge information management and delivery capabilities tailored to your industry’s ever-changing demands. Gain insight into how lead organizations are finding success using new and innovative techniques for unlocking the business value of information including:

* Business Intelligence and performance management
* Data quality, governance and integration
* Master data management
* Data warehousing
* Predictive, text analytics
* Data visualization, enterprise mashups
* Enterprise content management

Interact with IT and business decision-makers grappling with similar information management and business analytics challenges you face.

Learn more and register
 
 
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Looking for other ways to meet those performance management goals? Connect with us at info@performanceg2.com or call 877.742.4276. We will work with you and provide options on the best BI, CPM, FPM, data warehousing, consulting and staffing solutions out there.
 
 
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Sign up to receive our BI and CPM industry newsletter here: http://ow.ly/19YDs. Or email us and we will personally send you the most recent edition.
 

 
Looking for other ways to meet those performance management goals? Connect with us at info@performanceg2.com or call 877.742.4276. We will work with you and provide options on the best BI, CPM, FPM, data warehousing, consulting and staffing solutions out there.
 
 
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“We generate and use data like any other industry, but heath care does not lend itself to the use of discrete data because the outcomes are necessarily fuzzy and ongoing,” says Dick Gibson, M.D., the CIO at Legacy Health, an integrated network of six hospitals with research and other facilities in Portland. “Airlines have seats, schedules and know if you landing on time. In health care, we know you’re alive but the big money goes to broad sets of descriptive terms around patient care that are very qualitative.”

For BI and performance management to have meaning, these terms need to be unified and reconciled in their definition and accuracy. This can be a challenge in an industry that lacks standards and common data categories and definitions. “The challenges of data quality are multiplied by the number of codes and procedures managed in systems for lab results, pharmacy, check-in and other processes. Even within a single institution, the lack of standards, or ironically, the fact there are far too many, creates huge data quality and integration challenges.

As Ericson points out, however, “it’s a challenge providers must meet, both in response to consumer demand and regulatory interest in keeping down costs. That’s why information systems are increasingly required to bring a compliant and cohesive view to inpatient and outpatient facilities, right down to the bedside of the patient at the point of care. The approaches to meeting this challenge vary by hospital, with some opting for a single-vendor approach, while other turn to multiple software partners. The evolution of provider software companies offers an interesting comparison to other industries, which have adopted enterprise resources planning tools only to find the tools lacking. Nonetheless, the data warehouse in the clinical setting is here to stay.”

Read the rest of Jim’s informative article here – and see how he discusses how to implement BI effectively in a health care arena.
 
 
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Business reporting is the backbone of BI where not only C-level executives, but also managers and analysts, keep track of and can share their goals and key performance indicators (KPI) in daily operations; bringing better insight into their data and the outcome of decisions giving a direction to their organization all leading to efficiencies in business processes.

IBM Cognos has a set of business reporting tools each of which come with features aimed at specific business users. Query studio is one such Web based ad-hoc reporting tool. Query studio gives users the ability to create basic calculations with simple formatting options that run in multiple output formats and can be saved as ad-hoc queries for future references.

Analysis studio is another Web based or “zero foot print” tool that requires no installations other than a simple URL link, and it works with On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Dimensionally Modeled Relational (DMR) data sources. This tool is used for slicing and dicing, drilling up (to summary level) and down into details so users can swiftly and seamlessly arrive at the analysis they are looking for.

Report studio is considered the mother of all Web studios from Cognos BI arsenal. Report studio has the features of all the other reporting tools and then some. It is considered as a “pixel-perfect” tool which lets professional authors write simple to highly complex reports and distribute them to hundreds of users via various options. Apart from OLAP data sources and its MDX functions, report studio can also use relational data sources in creating reports and dashboards. The drag and drop feature helps in developing dashboards with great ease by dropping lists, pivot tables or cross tabs and various charts that usually enrich the real estate on the page and do away with number crunching on clustered report pages.

IBM Cognos report studio offers the ability to drill up and drill down from a summary to a detailed view of data and also allows drill throughs, when a user can jump from one report to another report related by common columns. Delivering reports in report studio can be done by attaching report outputs in emails or simply storing reports in a repository for shared or secured access. Outputs in PDF, HTML, Excel (various versions), CSV and XML can be accessed by users connected to the Web portal Cognos Connection that launches the various reporting studios. Another option is the ability to “burst” a report, which is a popular choice among many customers as it saves tremendous amounts of development time – as one report is run and its output is divided and delivered to the respective recipients – making certain, the appropriate security settings are incorporated to the lowest row level. An example of a ‘bursted’ report would be developing one sales report that gets pushed out to various sales reps, who would view only the accounts they have access to, thereby delivering unlimited report outputs based on distinct sales rep ID or the burst key.

Other reports that have been created using report studio are employee and product performance reports. For the financial sector there are income statements, balance sheets and actual versus budget reports with complex calculations that span over time periods. For the retail sector, there are track of stock reports. And for the defense or property management industry, the use of highly visual charts that make use of geographical BI by providing maps based on political boundaries or customized regions, have been created as well.

These powerful yet user-friendly business reporting tools create industry standard as well as customized solutions, and by providing the right information to the right people make investigating sweet spots and troubled areas of an organization possible and making BI a top priority for CIO’s across the globe.

 
 
 
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If you are having trouble getting your portal pages to render in a decent amount of time here is a little trick that can greatly improve performance.

When rendering a report in Cognos viewer portlet, in a portal page, the hour glass may just spin and spin. If the report runs fine on its own and is only slow in a portal page, then try this: instead of using a Cognos viewer portlet to render the report, use an HTML viewer portlet instead. I have used this technique for a dramatic increase in performance with multiple clients.

Stay tuned for more “tricks of the day” blog posts through out the next couple of months!

 
 
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As we (PerformanceG2) started the new year, we asked what can we do to further help organizations achieve their performance goals, what can we do to provide them with industry tools and support and how can we help provide the latest in industry news to better communicate exactly what is going on in the CPM community for 2010. We concluded with our industry resource InSight. Every month, we will distribute the InSight eNewsletter dedicated to communicating with the industry and dedicated to providing essential news, tips, videos, techniques, and more including a look into who we are at PerformanceG2 and what we are about. This is our way of staying active in the community as a performance management firm and updating our clients, partners, and industry colleagues on what we know is going on.

Therefore, check out our first edition of InSight here.

Let us know what you think, email us questions, sign up to receive the resource monthly, or just read and enjoy. This is our way of helping you go from InSight to Performance.
 

 
 
Looking for other ways to meet those performance management goals? Connect with us at info@performanceg2.com or call 877.742.4276. We will work with you and provide options on the best BI, CPM, FPM, data warehousing, consulting and staffing solutions out there.
 
 
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A data warehouse is in a unique position because its design is influenced by design assumptions in the source systems and business processes feeding into it. When these assumptions are proven incorrect, we are able to add huge value to the application development process by calling out the incorrect assumptions so that they might be addressed upstream or consciously chosen to be ignored. Either way, it’s our responsibility to make sure that we delicately communicate the potential issues to those who need to know. This leads to tighter business processes, stronger source systems, and ultimately better data for decision makers.

 
 
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Read/Write Users (RWU)- These are TM1 users who would update data in a model on a regular basis. They would create and view complex reports and views. Compared to the total number of users and RW users, 3:1 can be considered as a close approximation (concurrent user) ratio.

Read Only Users (ROU)- These are TM1 users who do not input data. Instead, they only read data or use pre-defined reports in Microsoft Excel or TM1 Web and require fast data access. Compared to the total number of users and RO users, 10:1 can be considered as a close approximation (concurrent user) ratio.
 
Estimating RAM:

Total concurrent users = 16
RAM required: 16 x 20 (MB per user) = 320MB
 
Estimating Data:
In TM1, each data item loaded occupies on average 14 bytes of RAM. Each calculated item will proportionally increase the data, and adding more CPU’s will benefit readers more than TM1 users or writers.
Rule of Thumb: Per CPU, 25 power users and 100 RO users

Data- 1,000,000 rows with 12 data items in each row = 160MB
Model with 5 years of data = 801MB

Calculations- Calculations forecast is 1 year of extra data = 160MB

Users- 10 users = 10 x 12MB = 120MB

Total Model Size- 801MB + 10MB + 120MB = 1.1GB
 
Report Server:
In a TM1 environment, use a Report Server for the following:

• If the RW users require fast access to static reports while data is being uploaded
• If writers lock server to the detriment of the readers
• If the RO user community outweighs the RW user community by a factor of 5 and there is constant RW activity on the main server
• If the RO users request reports simultaneously and if reporting performance is important, then use Reporting Server/Multiple Processes

 
TM1 Web Server:
In a TM1 environment, if the majority are Web users, then consider a separate TM1 Web server. TM1 Web servers should always run on separate physical servers if possible.
Rule of Thumb: Up to 250 concurrent users per CPU

 
 
 
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]]> http://performanceg2.com/2010/01/20/setting-up-tm1/feed/ 0 http://performanceg2.com/2010/01/18/cognos-tm1-workshop-portland-2010/ http://performanceg2.com/2010/01/18/cognos-tm1-workshop-portland-2010/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:23:46 +0000 candace taylor http://performanceg2.com/?p=1579  
By Candace Taylor, Marketing Coordinator for PerformanceG2
 
Join PerformanceG2 Cognos expert and Senior Consultant, Sanjeev Datta, for a complimentary, one-day IBM Cognos TM1 Workshop in Portland on February 18, 2010. You know you need a better solution for financial performance management – planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidations, analytics and reporting. But during the current economic downturn, cost-cutting measures and making the most of existing resources have become the order of the day. This workshop will provide a pragmatic approach to embracing and transforming the use of spreadsheets for more effective financial and operational performance management.

Experience a real-time approach to consolidating, viewing and editing enormous volumes of multi-dimensional data. With patented, 64-bit, in-memory OLAP server, IBM Cognos TM1 is the fastest way to deliver immediate value to your organization. In this workshop you’ll learn the key concepts and functionality of IBM Cognos TM1 and build a simple, easy-to-use application for expense management.

The seminar will include:

• Understanding OLAP and multi-dimensional databases
• Creating dimensions and cubes
• Loading and managing data
• Defining business rules
• Building powerful end user applications

Register here for this free Workshop.
 
 
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]]> http://performanceg2.com/2010/01/18/cognos-tm1-workshop-portland-2010/feed/ 0 http://performanceg2.com/2010/01/11/multi-dimensional-reporting-webinar/ http://performanceg2.com/2010/01/11/multi-dimensional-reporting-webinar/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:23:18 +0000 candace taylor http://performanceg2.com/?p=1570  
By Candace Taylor, Marketing Coordinator for PerformanceG2
 
Join PerformanceG2 Cognos expert and Senior Consultant, Sanjeev Datta, for a complimentary advanced look into Multi-Dimensional Reporting using Report Studio. This Webinar will provide an in-depth look into Report Studio, providing tips and techniques.

Attend the Webinar to learn:

• Dimensional reporting concepts
• In-depth focus on dimensional data
• Applying calculations and dimensional functions
• Understanding member set structures

Register here for this free Webinar.
 
 
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