Ibm and Cognos

1. How does improving decision making add value for a business?

Making the right decisions leads many times to proper management and is less costly. When the management is informed and equipped to make proper, structured and well rationalized decision. Proper decisions could lead to reduction of cost, company growth and larger revenues. "In the accelerating media industry, discovering relevant business insights within the chaos of available information can lead to substantial competitive advantage".

2. Explain why it might be useful to have detailed Web site metrics like those IBM provides.

It is helpful to have detailed Web site metrics because it allows the company to see customer behaviors and in turn be able to make business decisions based on the data. Collecting data, connecting the data together and leveraging it. That data that is internal to organization through CRM systems, billing systems then gives the company the ability to find synergy in that data and combine it, cleanse it, rationalize it into a structure that is compatible with programs like Cognos that helps with making the right business decisions. Being able to put things both into a big picture as well as detailed and informative package.

3. Use the Web to find out some of the specific capabilities of Cognos 8 BI.

IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence delivers the complete range of BI capabilities: Reporting, Analysis, Dashboarding and Scorecards on a single, service-oriented architecture (SOA). Author, share and use reports that draw on data across all enterprise sources for better business decisions.

Reporting - IBM Cognos 8 BI Reporting enables you to make smarter business decisions by providing a comprehensive set of reporting capabilities and access to the information you need. Reporting with IBM Cognos 8 BI delivers a single, Web-based, solution for all components of the reporting lifecycle:

• Self-service reporting enables you to get the information you need quickly and easily without relying on IT.

• Author once, access anywhere enables IT to create a single report that can be accessed on multiple devices, in 25+ languages, in multiple formats, and in other applications and processes.

• Report lifecycle enables collaboration between business and IT by enabling the sharing of queries and reports.

Analysis - IBM Cognos 8 BI Analysis enables the interactive exploration of information regardless of where the data is stored (OLAP and dimensionally modeled relational sources). It is particularly useful for managers and analysts who need to analyze and report trends in organizational performance. IBM Cognos 8 BI Analysis enables you to:

• Perform complex analysis quickly and easily to get to the "why"