Watson’s Inside – Accelerated Modeling and Reporting

This week at IBM’s INSIGHT 2015 conference the company announced their completely redesigned  business intelligence solution, Cognos Analytics, which now includes self-service design principles from Watson Analytics.

The new user experience design of “Cognos Analytics” is a secure, enterprise solution that accesses, analyzes and shares performance information across workgroups. It can scale to tens to thousands of users, is 100 percent web-based, and can be deployed on premises and on the Cloud.

With the redesign, business users and IT pros are now able to author and distribute reports, and access self-service dashboards, like monthly financial reports, weekly sales pipeline trends, daily production yields, hourly inventory levels – and do so on any device.

The redesign delivers a combination of self-service and managed analytics capabilities. Three of these new features are:

• Intent-driven modeling environment: With new intent-driven modeling capabilities, novice users can easily pull together the data they need without having to understand the technical details of the data sources. For example, by simply typing the words “revenue,” “product” and “department,” Cognos Analytics can interpret the user’s intent, search the data sources for those attributes and then propose the model to use.

• Smarter search that works in-context: Smarter search is enabled throughout the solution to help users quickly and easily find relevant content and accelerate the completion of tasks. In authoring mode, for example, a user can type “chart” and smart search instantly points to the right menu to add it. The user can even be guided to the most appropriate visualization for that data. As a result, line-of-business users can quickly and easily create their own reports and dashboards without help from IT – while power users still have access to all the detailed capabilities they need.

• A single environment for all types of business reporting: Cognos Analytics provides the full spectrum of enterprise and departmental reporting in one solution – from production managed reports to self-service authored reports and dashboards. This single environment provides the same experience in the office, on the road and on any device, to help satisfy the business demand for insight while helping to reduce IT backlogs. It can also help to ensure everyone is working from the same data, and can easy communicate and collaborate across teams and share information and findings instantly.

With self-service design principles in common, the new Watson Analytics features available in this release empowers user discovery, analysis predictions and visualization which now pairs with the new Cognos Analytics as a scalable source of enterprise BI.

Learn how you can get started in your journey with Cognos Analytics here.