IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Audit & Best practices

The business intelligence and performance management are changing as per the market requirements of the market. This in turn is also causing a flux in stored data and it’s processing, users, applications; a number of other functions are snowballing. These very processes and functions are the reason that an efficient evaluation platform is needed which could validate the processing of all the processes correctly. These needs of management and maintenance, in the initial stage as well as the emerging possibilities, the assessment platform can be used to check them.

In order to prevent problems, the root causes of the problems which persist due to unidentified reasons can be prevented by this kind of audit.

The very objective of the audit is to evaluate the cognos platform that is, if it is configured according to the prevalent customs and practices. The customs and practice which are followed so the best information is given meeting all the conditional details. The audit therefore then will surmount the following aspects:

Hardware architecture.
Usage of different cognos components.
Procedures for maintaining the platform.
Procedure for transferring the projects from different environment.
The integration of different components.
Modeling techniques.

Bilytica has extensive expertise in successfully setting up and configuring the cognos environment, as per the size and context. Thus the cognos consultant can assist in auditing the cognos business intelligence and performance management platform. This assistance can further aid in checking the right practices behind it. This audit will result into a list of recommendations, with predictions of cost and advantages, prescribing the improvement strategies for the platform in the usage.

There are many cognos business intelligence environments which started at a grass root level and expanded to large organizations in short time. Many a times, designing and optimized implementation of different components have been given little attention. In the absence of a planned architecture and unable to meet the implementation standards become an over growing issue very soon. The problems arising may vary, as:

Performance problems.
Increased complexity in security maintenance of cognos BI environment.
Increased complexity in models maintenance of cognos BI environment.
Problem in saving the effect of developmental work on the existing reporting which are employed by the end-users.
Reports based on framework packages may give wrong results.
The packages and cubes are complicated for the end-users.

Bilytica owns expertise in setting and configuring the cognos BI environment. It can assist in giving the best practices, just tailored according to the needs of the organizations.

If a cognos BI environment is already setup, Bilytica can provide the services to audit, with specifically problems under its focus. The most suitable practices, along with the audit can be covering following aspects:

Hardware architecture: the number of servers, type of servers needed. The method to split in between the different types of servers.
Software installation architecture: configuration of server on web, cognos gateway and the application server.
Security provider, integration with specific Cognos BI environment and their selection.
Setting up LDAP for security maintenance.
Different cognos BI environments for better controlled management: development, acceptance, test, production and training etc.
Procedures for transferring the cognos content in different environments.
The right security for framework model and checking the number of frameworks used.
The security of transformer model.
The right use of scheduling and bursting.

Bilytica has expertise regarding the environments where cognos BI or planning or controller are unified in one environment with increased productive synergies in between the BI suite and the financial modules of cognos suite etc.