Simply put, IBM IOD 2013 was a flood of information with a little added Fun. Perficient also came away with the Worldwide Performance Management Business Partner Excellence Award and the Enterprise Content Management Achievement Award. See details here

As a member of the Business Analytics practice at Perficient, I narrowed my focus to the Business Analytics Forum, one of four at the event. While exploring the exhibits and soaking up the sessions I came across many interesting discoveries. With some time to reflect (and a good night’s sleep) here are some of my overall takeaways:

Advanced analytics is becoming more accessible to the general user.

• How: IBM SPSS Analytic Catalyst is a recent addition to the analytics portfolio that makes predictive analytics and discovery easier for business users. Analytic Catalyst accomplishes this by automating portions of data cleansing and modeling, then automatically interpreting results and presenting analyses with interactive visuals and plain language. See a demo here
• Thoughts: As IBM SPSS continues to integrate with other reporting tools for new predictive abilities there is a lingering concern on staffing a resource that understands to world of advanced statistics. While this concern is often overblown Analytic Catalyst is a leap forward in simplifying SPSS use for the end user and reducing the risk of investment.

Traditional solutions such as financial planning, budgeting and forecasting are getting a facelift with advanced analytics.

• How: IBM SPSS is used to better identify weight of key metrics, model the results into confidence scores, then push this back to IBM Cognos TM1 for more actuate analysis.
• Thoughts: This is a natural progression for planning budgeting and forecasting, as it is a forward-looking solution as opposed to purely historical. Overtime, this will drive continued accuracy improvement as models mature.

There is stronger emphasis on data visualization techniques through a maturing library of reporting tools.

• How: The biggest showstoppers were mobile reporting through Active Reports, advanced dashboards with Workspace and Workspace Advanced and desktop reporting using Cognos Insight. Much of the buzz with reporting tools coming from the extended, hands-on lab sessions.
• Thoughts: Reporting improvements are enhanced by the interactive analytics community at www.AnalyticsZone.com. The opportunity for collaboration and new pre-canned visualizations creates fertile ground for innovations to grow from not only IBM but also the community of users.

We are seeing a reemergence of master data management (MDM) through big data.

• How: big data inherently includes an increase to data volume, variety and velocity, but leaves us with the growing challenge of veracity. IBM InfoSphere MDM leads the way in a growing Information Integration and Governance portfolio that IBM is clearly invested in moving forward. (See the data confidence infographic here)
• Thoughts: Years ago, the first wave of MDM hype for the traditional data warehouse seemed to be short-lived, but the new emergence of data governance becomes critical with big data. Anticipate additions to this portfolio for IOD 2014.

This sums up my top takeaways, what caught your eye at the event? Comment below!

A common point of frustration with business intelligence and analytics reporting users is the inability for one tool to do everything they imagine. This is often referred to as the ‘BI silver bullet’ myth. There is not one specific tool that will do everything you want, but most everything can be accomplished using a series of tools in combination. (If someone is telling you differently – be skeptical!)

IBM Business Analytics, for example, offers a library of tools with great advantages if used appropriately. However, a skill that often goes overlooked is the broad understanding of the library of tools and ability to decipher the right tool to use and the best way to customize that tool for a specific business question. This will sometimes lead customers down a frustrating path. This thinking often occurs on the first experience with business intelligence and analytic reporting. Users narrow down to one tool that resolves their problem better than all the others in the available library.  In fact, it does such a great job for them that they believe this tool will do the same for not only every other person, but also every other business question. The overall user adoption slips and the vocal champion of the product is left scratching their head.

This silver bullet idea often stems from the concept that this is an IT purchase and delivery. For example, if you need email, you get an email client; if you need a database, you buy database software. Business intelligence and analytics reporting is not only dependent on the data model design it sources but also the user’s ability to customize the front end for delivery. However, it is also important to consider that the use of different tools will result in a wide range of different delivery types. Additionally, each method of presenting data will also come with performance consideration based on the source model. While the skill of applying these considerations to selecting a tool is something acquired over time, I put together a high level breakdown of general reporting types and their recommended IBM Cognos tools as a reference:

Standard Reporting

• Perspective: High Level
• Description: Routine, static reports such as financial statements, audit and compliance Reports
• Best Model: DMR (Adaptive Warehouse/FM)
• Best Tool: Report Studio

Ad-Hoc Reporting

• Perspective: Low level
• Description: Rapid queries, look-ups with a focus on specific details
• Best Model: DMR (Adaptive Warehouse/FM)
• Best Tools: Query Studio, Cognos Insight (Free Desktop Application)

Analysis Reporting

• Perspective: High Level
• Description: Often cross-tab layout with rapid drill-downs and drag and drop comparisons
• Best Model: Cube (TM1)
• Best Tools: Analysis Studio, Cognos Insight (Free Desktop Application)

Dashboard

• Perspective: High level with drill-through to Low level
• Description: Multi perspective entrance point with drill down through defined analytic path to lower detail
• Best Model: DMR (Adaptive Warehouse/FM)
• Best Tools: Business Insight, Cognos Portlets/Report Studio

Subject Area Analytics

• Perspective: High level
• Description: Trending and historical comparison with ability to adjust on the fly
• Best Model: DMR (Adaptive Warehouse/FM)
• Best Tool: Adaptive Analytics

Predictive Analytics

• Perspective: High level
• Description: Pattern and association discovery for forward looking decision making
• Best Model: Any
• Best Tool: SPSS

So what exactly does it mean when Cognos performs a stitch query? Let’s start with a business scenario and question:

 A Manager asks a Report Developer to provide a report showing a comparison between Actual Sales and Forecast Sales for any years we have data.

But these measures come from two completely separate facts: the Forecast Fact and Sales Fact. How would Cognos understand their relation to each other? To achieve this Cognos uses a conformed dimension(s) (dimensions that occur in both facts) as a common data point. Since the Manager has requested the attribute Year as the granularity, we will use the dimension which Year is a part of: Time. The example below shows how the Time dimension for each fact is used to bridge the two subject areas:

Now that we have a way to relate the two facts, let’s create an actual report. The Report Developer is going to create a list report by dragging on three items:

Year | Actual Sales | Forecast Sales

Behind the scenes, Cognos will need to first perform a query for each fact separately to retrieve each year/measure combination:

Cognos will then stitch the two queries together on the common Year data points with a third stitch query, displaying this to the user:

From a technical standpoint Cognos is performing a full outer join between the queries. This can also be done using measures from multiple facts. While seemingly simple to the user, behind the scenes Cognos does the heavy lifting and gets surgical with stitch queries.