The Blog

Cognos & Iceland: A Match Made in Mr. Blue Heaven

December 29, 2016 by Mr. Blue Leave a Comment

Are you sitting dejected in Reykjavik, in desperate need of a Cognos guru?

Because if so, have I got a deal for you! This is a shot in the dark post which I hope turns into something – I’ve been to Iceland twice for a total of eighteen days and am willing to offer a very accommodative rate to clients in need of my expertise. While I can only conduct business in English or toddler level German, I’m happy to butcher an Icelandic phrase book while fixing your FM models or setting up your Cognos Analytics environment. I’m looking at you, Icelandair

You can contact me at rpdcognos@gmail.com

Þakka þér fyrir!

I’ll be at World of Watson!

October 21, 2016 by Mr. Blue Leave a Comment

I’m going to be attending World of Watson this year with Consulting firm PMsquare. Make sure to drop by our booth, say hello and pick up some high quality convention swag! We’re also hosting a number of after hours events that will include cocktails and scintillating talk of Dynamic Cubes. Ask for Mr. Blue to score an invite.

I look forward to seeing you all there!

Guess who’s back… back again

July 31, 2016 by Mr. Blue 2 Comments

After a long period of silence, this blog is returning from the dead. I had a very good reason to go dark – I was hired by an IBM competitor whose name rhymes with ‘horroracle.’ Having seen the light, I have returned to the Cognos fold. Expect regular updates going forward.

Cheers!

Review: Watson Analytics Explore

July 6, 2015 by Mr. Blue Leave a Comment

Interested in Watson Analytics? IBM Blueview has got you covered. Check out our Watson Analytics first look, Natural Language Query review and overview of Watson Analytics Professional pricing and features.

Today we’re going to take a gander at the query and visualization component of Watson Analytics, “Explore”. Standalone it is a highly competitive visualization tool that puts Cognos Workspace Advanced to shame; forming like Voltron with Watson Analytics’ other features yields a powerful and unique data slaying super-robot. If you’re curious how Watson Analytics stacks up against Tableau this is the most relevant feature for direct comparison and I can give you a free TLDR by saying: Pretty damn well.

Side note: life doesn’t offer a ton of opportunities to make Voltron jokes, one must seize the lion by the mane… … … sorry!

Launching an Exploration Expedition

Starting the Explore feature requires that you’ve uploaded a data set to Watson Analytics. From there you click on the massive “Explore” tile at the top of the screen and select the set in which you are interested, or you can select the set itself and choose “Explore” from the listed options. This launches a starting point for our exploration:

Starting out on the majestic journey of data discovery

The pane at the top is global across Watson Analytics and allows you to save, to quickly swap between open data sets and tools and to see my real name. Ooops.
Here you work the Natural Language magic we covered in our post on said topic, but briefly you type a question in English and will see suggested visualizations that (maybe) provide answers.
Watson Analytics assesses the data set and suggests a number of exploration starting points. You see a brief description of each above an image that tells you what sort of visualization it suggests. In our case “What is the trend of Receptions over Week by Position” is a line graph. Also notice the words in bold – those are column names from the data.
This little button brings up a window that lets you create custom dimensions, add new calculations and fields, and generally mess with the data.
Displayed across this bottom pane are each of the columns from the data set. Adding filters, groupings or calculations by clicking on an item will apply that change across all visualizations in your current “explore” session. Very handy!

If you are a Cognos guru or Tableau fanatic you might be saying to yourself, “This is kinda cool but can I skip all these suggestions and build it myself? As a guru fanatic I don’t need help from Doc Watson!” The answer to that is “No.” You are required to go through this screen to start. I wasn’t thrilled at first either but consider this – Tableau democratized visual storytelling and one-upped Cognos by empowering business experts to create compelling visualizations without IT: IBM fires back with Watson Analytics, which is a great visualization tool but also, crucially, is the expert. So no, they won’t let us skip the truly unique, potentially revolutionary features of a tool that analyzes the data automatically and can understand your questions.

Diving Into The Data with Watson Analytics Explore

Given that, let’s select “What is the contribution of Receptions over Week by Position?” Below you can see the results of a single click – a full featured visualization with a host of options for discovery and refinement. Let’s take a look at the interactive features:

Let’s start with the big one first – the visualization. Clicking on visualization elements brings up an explanation of their contents and provides a menu for refinement of the data – custom calculations, filters, etc can be accessed by simply clicking on a bar, point, bubble or box. Awesome.
Jumping to the top, here we find a number of other relationships Watson has uncovered automatically along with simplified visualizations representing the data. Clicking any of them will launch a full visualization like the one you see above.
The question you asked is displayed here. Here the words in bold from earlier are interactive – want to swap “Rushing Yards” for “Receptions?” Simply click and select the data you want. The visualization automatically updates.
The key is also interactive – clicking an element in the key opens a window to filter, calculate and otherwise manipulate that data set.
Anytime you see this icon in Watson Analytics you know you have options. Here we can make more advanced changes to the visualization as a whole.
You can create more than one visualization in an explore session – this is where they are managed. Create a new visualization, navigate through them, or display them all at once with these buttons.
The pin icon works like you’d expect it to – it pins the visualization for sharing with other users or the Assemble dashboarding tool. Next to that is the “change visualization type” button for swapping to different visualizations using your current data and filters. Finally, the visualization display options allow you to change the style and color of this visualization.

From here we have complete freedom to explore the data – expert users can breathe a sigh of relief. IBM has taken a huge leap forward in terms of design – you interact with each element by clicking on it rather than through hidden menus. Almost everything reacts as you expect it to. Explore offers a variety of tools to shape the data however for more serious data quality tasks you’ll want to use Assemble, which we’ll cover in a future post.

Watson Analytics Explore In Action

This is without a doubt the easiest query/visualization tool in the IBM Analytics stack. Cognos Workspace Advanced and Report Studio require significant technical skill and education to use effectively, as well as a data modeler to clean and present the data. Watson Analytics Explore lacks many of the enterprise features of Cognos but is staggeringly more advanced when it comes to usability, agility and high fidelity presentation. Behold!

What you see above took approximately seven minutes of work. I can make something that looks very similar – but not as sharp – in Cognos in approximately two hours. However, clicking any of these charts will drill down to a large, fully interactive version which is easily refined. That functionality in Cognos is more like a consulting engagement. To top it off, the bottom pane is acting as a global filter – I currently have the NFC North selected, but the entire data set can be instantly filtered with the results rendered in all visualizations…instantly!

IBM’s Analytical Agility

“Agile” is, at this late stage, a methodology, buzzword and parody bundled neatly together, and its insights are eye-rolling obvious but still necessary, especially in Business Intelligence. A good BI deployment leads to new questions and a great one leads to new questions that must be answered urgently. If after go live the users politely agree that all requirements have been met and the system is complete you must immediately stow the champagne because you have failed.

This is where IBM and Cognos most often fail, due more to outmoded thinking than technical limitations in the product. Cognos does not require a six month workflow to make a new graph but the vestigial processes of the waterfall era weigh it down. In a sort of perverse way Tableau’s greatest strength is that you simply cannot do that much. The temptation to drown it in requirements, governance and process is ignored.

This is where Watson Analytics Explore fills a huge gap for Big Blue. It is free and easy to use. It looks great. It interacts with the much more complex features of Watson Analytics but doesn’t require them and thus offers a very low barrier to entry. And it is agile in the way a great BI project is agile; it answers questions with questions and does so beautifully. Like Tableau, it’s design makes obvious how it is to be used: quickly, joyfully and unburdened.

Site News: Mr. Blue joins IBM Premier Partner PMsquare

June 7, 2015 by Mr. Blue 1 Comment

A quick life update for you – I recently accepted a consultant position with IBM Premier Partner PMsquare. As many of you Cognos gurus know, early Summer 2015 marks the moment when Cognos recruiters fully emerged from their Great Recessionary slumber and began furiously ~~hunting for fresh meat~~ searching for new talent. I spoke with a number of very impressive potential employers but settled on PMsquare for three key reasons:

An impressive collection of talent: PMsquare recently hired my A-number-one biggest Cognos crush, Paul Mendelson. The opportunity to work with him was too good to pass up, and the fact that PMsquare landed him over other, larger IBM Analytics partners impressed me. While out for beers with some of the team last week I realized that of the four people at the table I probably knew the least about Cognos. That was a seriously great feeling for me.
They’ve been there before: While PMsquare is relatively new to the Cognos Consulting game much of the leadership and staff comes from Brightstar Partners. The company is new but these people are not noobs.
Managing Partner Dustin Adkison owns a brewery: Yes, he did literally write a book on Cognos, but more important than that Dustin Adkison is a part owner of Cahoots Brewing in Chicago, IL. People who love Cognos and beer are my kind of people.

What does this mean for IBM Blueview? Nothing. The site remains a personal project unaffiliated with IBM, PMsquare or anything else. I will continue to provide you with all the hot takes on IBM Cognos, Watson Analytics and whatever the future holds.

Cognos Community Spotlight: Cognos Paul

June 7, 2015 by Mr. Blue 1 Comment

In working towards the egalitarian ideals of the ~~revolution~~ IBM Blueview Manifesto, I am proud to present our very first community spotlight interview with IBM Cognos level 99 superwizard Paul Mendelson. Better know as “Cognos Paul”, you’ve likely found success with one of solutions featured on his widely respected blog of the same name – or you’ve unknowingly done so via the many IBM tech notes to which he is a primary contributor.

Paul recently relocated to the United States from Israel and is currently consulting through IBM partner PMsquare. Below is a lightly edited version of an email exchange between Paul and I in April, 2015.

How did you first get involved with Cognos?

This is actually a bit embarrassing. My start with Cognos was a result of laziness and an extraordinary amount of luck. Right out of high school (around 2001) I started a company to build a handheld device to play computer games. Arrow pad, a bunch of extra buttons, and emulators for every OS known to man. It was linux based and the first prototype actually had a regular PC power supply. My partners and I spent all of our money developing it and we managed to get Samsung’s attention. I flew to Seoul twice, and actually shook hands with the CEO (at the time) K T Lee. We were assigned a project manager, and we flew back home to celebrate, and proceeded to hear nothing for the next two months. Apparently they had a management shuffle and my project was deposited directly in the bit-bucket.

Completely broke, and my only skills being having great ideas and playing computer games, I started working in a call center. It turns out that I am really bad at customer service, and even worse at sales. So they pulled me off the phones and stuck me on data entry, transforming Excel sheets into the correct format. It also turns out that, at the time, I was incredibly lazy. So I wrote macros to do everything for me, and played Freecell. When they found out I was terrified they were going to fire me. Instead they put me in the company reporting team. I started building reports in Excel. When it got to the point where running the VBA took a few minutes, I learned Access. Eventually I was given access to a tool called Hyperion Brio, which I hope to never see again. Eventually we got this brand new state of the art BI tool called Cognos 8.2. Compared to Brio, it was incredible. Imagine the difference from 8.2 to 10.2.2, but even more.

Eventually the call center folded, and I got hired as a senior consultant by a Cognos consulting firm.

Can you describe your career a bit? What sort of employers/projects have you worked with?

I’ve worked with consulting firms most of my career. Even when I was in the call center, it was all project based. Since I started working with Cognos, I’ve moved from project to project, and I’m very glad of it. The full list of companies I’ve worked for would essentially a list of companies in Israel that work with Cognos. A few banks, several insurance companies, several government and military offices, a major pharmaceuticals company, a port, a car service/security company, a couple telecoms companies, and a few others that I’m forgetting about. Each company had their own quirks and difficult requirements. One of them needed reports based on a database had a constant flow ~200k rows being inserted every second. Another wanted Cognos completely rebranded. I actually wrote my first article, How to add icons to portal tabs in IBM Cognos Connection based on my work there.

I really can’t emphasize enough how important I feel it is to move from one project to another. Every place I’ve worked at has presented problems that I’ve never considered, or has exposed me to technology that I’ve never had to work with.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in BI?

There has been a great deal of iterative, linear changes. Databases get faster, and have more capabilities. BI tools are becoming easier to use, and data is becoming easier to consume (better visualizations, more ways to access the reports, faster run times). IBM and all of the major BI firms are really pushing the self service capabilities, but I’m skeptical. I’ve never gone wrong betting on the laziness of users, and I still expect them to prefer waiting for an IT team to build the reports over trying to do it themselves.The biggest change for me is the introduction of Watson. There has always been a gap between historic reporting (where are the bottle necks in the current production line?), predictive analytics (where is the next point of failure in my production line?), and actionable insights (shut down machine A and get a maintenance team on it before the gears fall off). SPSS is a great tool, but schlubs like me don’t have a chance with it.

What skills do you find most useful and what would you recommend a Cognos developer learn to take their game to the next level?

“Cognos developer” covers such a wide range of tools that it really depends on the direction they want to go in.In terms of data modelling, it’s incredibly important to learn about data warehousing. Read all of Kimball’s books. Read all of Inmon’s. Cognos works best with Kimball’s dimensional design, but you can massage it to work with almost anything. Learn how your database of choices processes queries. Learn as much about DBAing as your local DBA, and make sure you know what kind of candy he likes for when you need some help. Framework Manager and the SQL engine both have their own set of quirks. Framework is actually one of the products where training truly is a must. It’s also important to understand the difference between a relational model, DMR, and Dynamic Cubes, and why/when to use them.

A report developer should have a much wider range of interests. Building an efficient query means having an understanding of SQL/MDX, and how Cognos generates the queries, and how the database will process it. Making effective and easy to consume reports is actually harder than it looks. Reading up on visualization techniques is important. Read Stephen Few and Edward Tufte. JavaScript is invaluable for making complex interactive reports. The developer needs to understand how the elements are generated in HTML, and how to modify them with JS. People skills are also important, especially if you need changes in the model.

Can you share some of the most avoidable Cognos mistakes you see clients make?

The worst mistake I see is when a client moves from one BI tool to another, and try to make the reports look and behave identical. When people start fighting the tool instead of working with the strengths, the project is doomed to failure. If you’re working hard, then something is wrong. Another problem I see is trying to do everything at once. I’ve been in a few projects were the clients started the report development at the same time as the data model. Hair-loss is almost guaranteed if you’re building a report on a model that’s constantly changing.

Focusing more on Cognos, generally problems occur when people try to use all of the latest capabilities and features. Dynamic Cubes work very well with certain types of data, specifically long and narrow, but when you have only a few million rows DMR should be fine. Analyze the needs and use the appropriate tools in the appropriate manner. While Framework Manager technically allows you to mix DMR and a relational model, it also allows you to build a crossjoin between two multi-billion row tables. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The BI industry is changing rapidly with the move to Cloud, new vendors like Tableau, etc. How would you like IBM to respond?

Cognos does have a cloud offering, and some companies are beginning to open up to the idea. The big security concerns are being resolved.
One of the bigger draws of the smaller BI tools is the advanced visualization techniques. Back in 2009 I was given a demo of SAS JMP and was blown away by the interactive visualization tools. The presenter took data that I provided, and quickly built an interactive dashboard including a 3 dimensional scatter plot. He tied a list to it and clicking on a row highlighted the associated dots in the plot. IBM is getting close with Cognos Insight, but they still need a lot of work. RAVE could be the answer to it, especially if they can find a way to get the interactive graphs in live reports.

Finally, do you have any general advice for people starting a career who may be interested in pursuing BI?

The most important thing for any career is to enjoy it. It pays well eventually, but you have to have a true passion for it to get to that point. A vast amount of my free time consists of reading books or experimenting with Cognos. Most of the BI firms have free or demo versions available. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, but try to solve problems. There’s an indescribable rush when you solve a problem you’ve been working on. Go looking for problems. Trying to solve a problem someone runs into can often give insight into approaches you’ve never considered.

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