Knowledge base

Since 2012, the leading analyst Gartner started to use "Business Analytics" to refer to the concept and the market of solutions for "Business Intelligence and Performance Management”. With this move, Gartner follows in the footsteps of other analysts like IDC and the leading solution-vendors in the space like IBM, Oracle, SAP and SAS.

In 2012, Gartner started to switch from using the term of Business Intelligence Competence Center (BICCs) to Business Analytics Team (BAT). The concept of the BICC was originally introduced by Gartner about 10 years ago. Background of the renaming seems to be related to the fact that on the one hand "center" has negative connotations in the US (eg.

IBM Cognos Connection is the web-based IBM Cognos portal. This portal provides an access point to several IBM Cognos studios like Report Studio, Analysis Studio, Query Studio, Metric Studio and Event Studio. It can also be used to create shortcuts, URLs, pages and to organize entries for your own use. You can search for specific entries or give them personalized icons. An administrator can use IBM Cognos Connection to administer security, servers, bursting, permissions and properties related to jobs, agents or other entries.

IBM Cognos Administration is part of the web-based IBM Cognos portal named Cognos Connection and can be accessed via the launch menu in Cognos Connection. This module is only visible if the user has the required permissions. A lot of important administration activities can be managed in this module. With the correct permissions you can setup user security, manage servers and reports. Besides all those tasks, it is also possible to configure settings, dispatchers, portal services and manage schedule activities.

IBM Cognos Business Insight is a business intelligence workspace accessible from IBM Cognos Connection. The tool allows users to create dashboards based on already created reports or analysis. It gives users the ability to assemble and analyze virtually all the data in the company in a personalized way. Within Business Insight you can also make use of the reporting capabilities to create reports.

IBM Cognos Analysis Studio is the web-based analysis component within IBM Cognos Connection. The tool is used for multidimensional/OLAP- analysis and can deal with large sets of data. By making use of the drag-and-drop functionality you can explore, analyze and compare dimensional data in a quick way. Analysis Views can be stored in the Cognos Connection portal. Analysis Studio allows you to create extra calculations, apply filters, sort on values, drill down and drill up, show values as percentages and even show them graphically in charts.

IBM Cognos Report Studio is a Web-based professional reporting tool, part of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence. It is used to create more complex and advanced reports. Within Report Studio report authors have the ability to create multi-page and multi-query reports and it has a large set of functions to make complex calculations and visualisations.

IBM Cognos Framework Manager is the data modeling tool in IBM Cognos. It is not a web-based application but a client application that needs to be installed separately. Framework Manager is available as a 32-bit installation only but can work perfectly fine in a 64 bit environment. Framework Manager generates packages which are based on a framework model and are used to create reports on. A model is a list of namespaces, objects, query subjects, dimensions, filters and calculations.

IBM Cognos Metric Studio is used to create a scorecard application and monitor the metrics within the applications. A metric is a key performance indicator (KPI) related to time. A scorecard shows graphically how a metric is performing. This is typically done by using red, orange and green status notations. IBM Cognos Metric Studio is part of the Cognos Business Intelligence modules.

IBM Cognos Event Studio is a web-based Cognos Business Intelligence module. It is used for creating and managing agents and alerts. The purpose of a process or an agent is to monitor the data in the background to ensure that critical information is detected quickly and to perform tasks when a predefined boundary is reached.