Cognos Analytics

Upgrading to Cognos Analytics

Every process can be broken down to a methodology.  After having help many customers upgrade to Cognos Analytics, I have established a repeatable process. As anecdotal as it may sound, I will include some specific facts that may help you in your journey. The steps include

1. Planning the Upgrade
2. Environment Setup
3. Establishing a Baseline
4. Content Migration
5. Validation and Remediation
6. Go Live

This session will cover the Go Live phase.

After the migration, what’s next?

• If you had disabled the schedules they should be enabled for those reports that have been migrated.
• It would be beneficial to keep both environments running in parallel for a period of time. The old environment could be restricted and only used to investigate issues should any arise.
• If you are migrating in batches you should enable users in the new environment that align to those reports that have been migrated. Depending on your security concerns you could provide all your users access to the new environment. Remember the licensing has changed and there are new tools included in the default roles, you may need to revisit how the user access is defined.
• If your users are not familiar with Cognos Analytics then some education would be beneficial.

Training

If your previous environment was C10 or earlier it would be important to provide an introduction to the new portal. Report Authoring has changed from Cognos 10 to Cognos Analytics 11 and again in Cognos Analytics 11.1 so your training should be specific to the release.

Reports that have been migrated should be accessible with some basic training, here are some links to get started.

Cognos Analytics –YouTube Channel

https://www.youtube.com/user/Analyticszone/featured

https://www.youtube.com/user/IbmBaEducation/featured

Library of How-To Videos for IBM #Cognos Analytics

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/businessanalytics/participate/blogs/blogviewer?BlogKey=f321f00f-1405-4212-8a3a-2def4feec0ee

Demos and Hands on Labs

https://www.ibm.com/demos/collection/IBM-Cognos-Analytics/

Modernization

After Go-Live with the existing content you should build a strategy on how to modernize your analytics. That sounds complicated but the implementation is actually simple. The new features of Cognos Analytics are making it easier to build modern solutions.  The direction of Adhoc reporting is changing from what is now labeled Legacy Studios to various components of the Cognos Analytics environment including Dashboards, Exploration and Stories.   Dashboards provide an interactive and visual data discovery capability. Exploration is the AI assisted ad-hoc data discovery tool. The new licensing of Analytics Users has access to many of the tools.

The new licensing of Analytics Users has access to many of the new tools.

Reports that have been migrated will have the same behavior as they did in the previous version of Cognos where new reports will default to the interactive user interface with the pop-up menus.  It is not recommended to bulk update all reports to use the new interactive features for several reasons. The most complex reason for not automatically updating a report to the new interactive viewer is the implementation of JavaScript. Here are some details on using JavaScript in Cognos Analytics.

A future Blog will cover modernization in more detail.

If you need help with your migration please contact IBM Expert Labs or Cognos Analytics Advocates