Data is invaluable to a company, but it can spawn a disorganized jumble of information about financial transactions, sales figures, inventory and customers. So how can an enterprise know the data is being delivered together in a meaningful way? For Cognos customers, the answer is business intelligence (BI). With BI, executives understand how the company is performing, can forecast changes and answer the question: "What should we be doing?"

The missing pieces
J-Doe Industries, a fictitious but typical company, has reached a critical point in its growth, with large amounts of data that could be useful if connected together and made available across the organization.

Unfortunately, J-Doe segregated its data in silos according to department, resulting in sluggish operations and communication gaps between functions and management levels. Management had to collect data from separate areas of the business and cobble it together to create the "big picture." This is a difficult, time-consuming and expensive way to complete the puzzle.

A good fit
Many companies are in the same situation as J-Doe. They lack the analysis and reporting capability that can propel them forward and provide an understanding of how performance affects the business from one end to the other.

enlarge Cognos 8 connects to the Teradata enterprise data warehouse without requiring external caches. This allows users to easily leverage the business value within the data warehouse.

These companies found that using a Teradata enterprise data warehouse and Cognos in combination brought the kind of unity necessary for boosting BI, performance management, planning and reporting.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence delivers the full range of intelligence capabilities—reporting, analysis, scorecards, dashboards and business event management, as well as data integration, on a single, proven platform.

With its data warehouse expertise, Teradata provides the structure for the data, pooling all of the information into one stable, easily accessed, enterprise location that Cognos effectively leverages to deliver BI.

To keep its customers on track, Cognos 8 BI scorecards help boost the capability of conventional reporting by allowing users to set their own targets.

The dashboards developed by Cognos bring together the information from diverse corporate systems and present the information in a dynamic view of business conditions. J-Doe created a single page with four different sections to gauge its progress worldwide. The view showed quota levels by country and compared countries against each other.

At the heart of financial reporting and regulatory compliance, the financial consolidation feature in the Cognos 8 Controller empowers its clients to tap into a single, common chart-of-accounts structure.

With Cognos 8 Controller, J-Doe reduced its reporting cycles by days in some situations, by weeks in others. The product enabled J-Doe to add pre-built rules and calculations to scorecards, and its single version of financial data allowed the company to better plan and forecast, as well as to evaluate financial results across multiple currencies, legal entities and countries. J-Doe also uses the search functionality as its main enterprise search engine.

Underlying the various reporting options of Cognos 8 BI are its analysis capabilities. Cognos 8 BI enables guided exploration and analysis of information in all dimensions of a business, regardless of where the data is stored. Teradata/Cognos customers have the flexibility with Cognos 8 to conduct this analysis and report against dimensionally modeled relational sources directly in the Teradata Warehouse and online analytical processing (OLAP) sources.

A complete picture
Together, Teradata and Cognos provide an integrated solution that can illuminate root causes of issues within an organization. The solution allows C-level management to communicate strategic initiatives quickly and effectively. Enterprise leaders can track the progress on different initiatives, thereby increasing accountability and ownership among employees and, subsequently, positively affecting performance.

This type of enterprise planning boosts collaboration within an organization so teams can make better strategic and operational decisions.

A company may use Cognos to quickly and painlessly segment customers according to factors such as industry, geography or sales history. This provides fresh insight into how to tailor marketing campaigns, change pricing or gauge the popularity of new products.

Since everyone from an intern to the CEO can use Cognos 8 BI, thanks to its intuitive interface, the tool set connects every level of the organization together. Time and energy can be saved by going straight to setting goals, planning strategies and analyzing reports created by Cognos 8 BI.

For every company, time is money. Hours spent tracking down data or rooting through databases are costly, and prevent a company from doing what it should be doing: improving performance and increasing intelligence. T

Elizabeth Millard writes about technology.

Teradata Magazine-June 2007