In February last year the lives of all of us at Synergy, and that of many of our customers, were deeply touched when one of our senior consultants, Elna Britz, was tragically killed in a car accident on the way to our year-end event.

Basking in the success of its BI graduate programme, Synergy Business Intelligence has embarked on a similar strategy which will see it not only expand its financial performance management (FPM) division, but will give postgraduate students the opportunity to hone their skills under the mentorship of expert senior consultants.

Business analytics break new ground for smarter decision-making

IBM Cognos users can confidently look forward to exciting and innovative technology to further enhance their business analytics and information management capabilities.

This is the feedback from one of Synergy Business Intelligence’s senior consultants, Dennis Chu, who recently returned from IBM’s centennial – and largest to date – Information on Demand (IOD) event for 12 000 attendees in Las Vegas, where he delved into the latest business analytics offerings.

Experience information like never before with IBM Cognos Mobile. Access and interact with all of the rich reports and dashboards you need to make the smartest business decisions, all on your Apple iPad.   ... and it's FREE!!!

Taking dashboard design up a notch has proven to be a pressing need, as Synergy Business Intelligence discovered when it recently announced its upcoming “Best Practice Dashboard Design” workshops.

“The response has been overwhelming,” said managing director, Christo Bredenkamp. “We all know that dashboards can be functional, but more and more users are realising that, in the right hands, the same dashboards have the potential to be powerfully compelling and keenly thought-provoking.”

 

The Bearing Man Group, Africa's leading distributor of dynamic engineering consumable products, has completed the first phase of its implementation of the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) suite with the assistance of Synergy Business Intelligence. The initiative is already delivering considerable benefits.

 

 

Companies which rely on information for their performance often face the challenge of data overload. For South African private client business BoE Private Clients, this issue came to a head as a result of its strong growth which rendered a previously reliable bespoke solution cumbersome and unreliable. The answer to its data processing requirements lay in IBM’s Cognos 8

September 29, 2011/12:00 PM ET

Demand for data warehousing continues to expand. But as data volumes increase, and new applications and users are added, costs may escalate rapidly. This Webcast presents the results of independent research showing how use of IBM InfoSphere Warehouse may allow organizations to better meet demand while reducing three-year software costs by 39 to 69 percent compared to use of Oracle 11g solutions. The emphasis is placed on hard data drawn from user experiences.

Find out more >>

September 15, 2011/12:00 PM ET

In a study commissioned by IBM, Forrester Consulting describes MDM as a critical business capability and technology foundation. IBM clients interviewed achieved a variety of operational benefits from their MDM programs, including call center savings, improved efficiencies for inside sales staff, and lower costs for customer mailings and returns. In fact, Forrester found that a composite organization received a risk-adjusted return of 36% on its investment in IBM InfoSphere MDM, with benefits beginning to accrue in the first year of implementation. To learn more, join this Webcast featuring Rob Karel and Jon Erickson from Forrester.

Find out more >>

September 20, 2011/12:00 PM ET

In order to begin implementing information governance, you need to communicate policies and plans, have executive sponsorship and gain acceptance across the organization. In this session, we will discuss how to sell information governance throughout the organization and gain acceptance to what potentially is a new way of thinking, including communication planning, measuring key performance indicators, and continuous improvement.

Find out more >>

Wednesday, 21 September 2011
12:00 pm noon, EST

Tuesday, September 2011
12 PM  ET
Duration: 60 minutes

In these turbulent economic times, you need to make better decisions, faster. You need to identify performance gaps, assess alternatives quickly and intelligently, and enable effective execution.

14 April 2009

You’ll hear how implementing data governance for your data warehouse can promote it to the trusted “single repository of truth” – giving you accurate and consistent data to help your organization thrive.
Data Governance for Data Warehouses: Helping Your Organization Thrive
Event date: Thursday, April 14 at 11 a.m. ET / 8 a.m. PT

25 March 2009

As you are now all aware, Cognos has been fully integrated into the IBM brand. We have decided, in order to keep you all abreast of the changes and what they entail, to host an event that will introduce our loyal customers to the new IBM Brand. You will have an opportunity to ask any questions you feel we have not addressed, product updates, who our team is and how it is structured, new contact information and much more.

Understanding what motivates your upper management will make data modeling justification much easier.

Read about how Mayflex used IBM Cognos Express to replace a complex spreadsheet system, improve time-consuming budgeting and forecasting processes,...

IBM will use its Cognos business intelligence software to parse the data and generate reports and statistics for an online dashboard for government managers ...

Discover the problems that will show the greatest return on an investment.

Where the rubber hits the road to turn BI into a thriving profit center.

This document describes an IBM Cognos Report Studio report design technique that can be used for master-detail style reports running against a relational data source.

By Michael Vilhauer, Consultant, Brightstar Partners

Allowing users to change a hierarchy used in a Report Studio report while maintaining the drill-up and drill-down capabilities from a DMR or cube data source may seem very difficult to achieve. This article outlines how to achieve this user functionality in both manageable and relatively simple steps using a prompt page and Cognos macros.  
 
For detailed steps for how to create this user on-demand hierarchy maintaining the drill-up and drill down functionality in a report in Cognos 8, click here.

Date dimensions are in high demand. Nearly every warehouse and data mart has at least one date dimension. They are extremely useful in Cognos reporting - end users frequently want to analyze data by year, quarter, month, etc.

Article taken from BSP Newsletter 052, April 2011

The question is always asked "How can I improve performance on my Cognos environment?"  Unfortunately the generic answer seems to always be "It Depends..." 

Indexes are critical to good performance. However many people don't understand how indexes work. Here is an introductory article on the basics of indexing.

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