Synergy is pleased to announce that it has been awarded IBM ‘Premier’ partner status, the highest level of accreditation available to IBM Business Partners. 

What’s it like being a consultant in the information technology (IT) industry? That’s something anyone considering a career in this environment should ask themselves. In this article, Morné le Roux, Senior Consultant, Synergy Business Intelligence provides an interesting perspective – one which highlights the skills you’ll need as well as the experiences you are likely to have working in the front line of advanced technology.

...The pressures on CFOs are increasing in this age of governmental regulations, financial markets and the internal need to provide accurate financial data more quickly. These pressures are rising so much that CFOs are re-examining the structure and operation of their organizations. Beyond their most basic job function of being responsible for all things financial, both internal to the company and external, they are being challenged to partner with operational areas to drive consistency and efficiency across the entire organization.

Business intelligence (BI) implementations can provide great insight and bring enormous benefits, like sales enhancements or cost reductions, to companies during harsh economic conditions. However, most organizations are only focused on finding solutions to help them get through the immediate business pain rather than working toward the future.

Just exactly how is business intelligence used in the field? Is it delivering on its full potential, or are users merely scratching the surface and limiting the value that can be created from investments in the technology?

 

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

Learn how technology can help your organization turn data into insight, manage costs, and drive business growth. Join us on Wednesday, September 15* for our third quarterly virtual summit. We'll be unveiling the newest capabilities of IBM Cognos Express, the reporting, analysis and planning software that's purpose-built for midsize companies.

Register to see presentations and demonstrations and text chat “live” with experts - without the time loss or expense of being away from the office.

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We invite you participate in a brief survey on Business Intelligence to help us better understand and address the specific needs of a BI professional and of the BI program office.

When it comes to information, quality is more important than quantity. In fact, many finance departments are so overloaded with information, they can’t effectively gain the insight they need to move their business forward.

An InformationWeek & Intelligent Enterprise Webcast: Date: Tuesday, June 22, 2010

In this invaluable 60-minute on demand webinar, three leading experts discuss the benefits of adopting an enterprise reporting solution.

Mark Smith, CEO & EVP Research of Ventana Research, Robbie Kaplan, Director of Business Intelligence, Constar and Jane Farquhar, Product Marketing Manager, IBM Cognos Software, will explain how you can:

•    Deliver an accurate, comprehensive view of the business
•    Reduce IT backlog and constant reporting requests
•    Lay the foundation for performance management

Delivering actionable business intelligence is absolutely critical if your organization is to survive and thrive in today’s market. View this important on demand webinar now.

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.

For any business intelligence (BI) project to succeed, proper project management guidelines, requirements gathering and expectations have to be created. In addition, because of the complexity involved in evaluating and purchasing a data warehousing and/or BI solution, businesses should develop an understanding of the architectural options available beyond what IT requires for development, testing and maintenance. Decision makers require this understanding to identify how data quality initiatives or data latency requirements will affect service level agreements as well as the integrity and value of the information and analytics being provided.

This article, a continuation of Part 1 of this series, discusses these concepts and looks at the importance of focusing on the customer, the benefits of developing broad-reaching BI initiatives, and how to tie these to project success.

This two-part series provides some general hints into how organizations can limit the risk associated with their BI projects.

Background:
Note from Maureen Clarry: My recent article Dysfunctional Business Intelligence Teams discussed the high-level applicability of Patrick Lencioni’s (2002) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team to business intelligence (BI) teams. For the next five months, I’ve invited experts from our Knowledge Network to take a deeper look at each dysfunction in a series of separate articles. This month, James Wood will explore the first dysfunction – the lack of trust.

IBM Cognos BI solution helps Fabryo reduce inventories and increase customer satisfaction.

Jill Dyché reconsiders her take on agile BI — for a second, anyway

This HOT TIP will illustrate a simple technique that combines a Cognos 8 Report Studio report with some embedded HTML that will act as an On-Line help document for your application.

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This HOT TIP will demonstrate how to set up a Prompt report that will allow users to preselect the run output of the report before rendering the initial HTML version.  

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Download the Hot Tip on How to create an optional slicer prompt

Download the steps on how to get a fix list for Cognos 8.2 , 8.3 and 8.4

How to use MUNS, Macros and dimensional functions to apply date prompts to OLAP data sources.