Introduction

IBM Cognos 10 BI is the leading performance management tool, which enables users to monitor, measure, and manage corporate performance at a glance.

With its dashboard capabilities, users can assemble and organize data in personalized dashboard views to support different decision-making requirements.

IBM Cognos 10 BI is a bundle of tools that are accessible through a web interface and can be used for different sets of requirements. The following table briefly touches upon each of these:

IBM Cognos 10 BI has introduced IBM Cognos Business Insight and IBM Cognos Business Insight Advanced, which are the two components that can be used to author and view dashboards.

IBM Cognos Business Insight is used to create sophisticated interactive dashboards from the existing content. For instance, assume a user has already created four different reports each catering to sales, marketing, HR, and finance, using Report Studio. Individual sections in these reports can then be used in IBM Cognos Business Insight independently, to create an interactive dashboard. This would mean that the dashboard can have a few charts from the first two reports, and a list and a crosstab from third and fourth reports respectively.

IBM Cognos Business Insight Advanced is used to perform deeper analysis and report authoring where a user can perform more advanced data exploration, such as adding additional measures, conditional formatting, and advanced calculations. This can be thought of as a clipped version of IBM Cognos Report Studio, which is a complex report authoring tool in which queries and calculations can be built.

In this book we will be covering various aspects of IBM Cognos 10 Business Insight and IBM Cognos 10 Business Insight Advanced.

Readers are advised to install and configure IBM Cognos 10 BI and Samples (GO Sales and GO Data Warehouse), provided with the tool installation kit. For detailed installation and configuration instructions, please refer to IBM Cognos 10 BI Installation and Configuration Guide, shipped with the product.