Upgrading any system is a big undertaking! Our team here has worked very hard over the years to ensure the upgrade process is smooth. Upgrading to the latest version of Cognos Analytics can provide many benefits including improved performance and access to a huge list of innovative features including effortless and intuitive self-service interface that transforms data into valuable insights in no time. It’s highly encouraged to upgrade Cognos Analytics to the latest released version 12.0.x. We will no longer be providing Continuing Support for Cognos Business Intelligence 10.2.x and Cognos Analytics 11.0.x releases as of April 30, 2024. You can click here to learn more about it. For Cognos Analytics 11.1.x releases, Continuing Support program is not being offered so clients who are not able to upgrade their version of Cognos Analytics before the End Of Service date of April 30, 2024 will have an option to purchase Extended Support.
Some of the benefits of upgrade are:
User friendly interface – The vision of Cognos Analytics truly supports the product its turned into – “AI-powered insights faster, for everyone” . Everyone can start analyzing data from the time they login to Cognos Analytics. You’ll also notice a fresh new homepage that greets you with easy-to-access tiles for key functions like Uploading Data, Preparing Data, Exploration, and Presenting Data. These tiles make it easy for users to navigate and jump into specific tasks saving valuable time. It enables insights by presenting visualizations from simply typing a question allowing users to feel empowered.
Modernization- 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. This tool also supports predictive analysis and forecasting. The new licensing of Analytics Users has access to many of the tools. Today, Cognos Analytics already allows data scientists to use their own models, integrating with Cognos via Jupiter Notebooks and/or Watson Studio. Integrating Cognos content into Collaboration platforms like Slack and Teams is also available.
AI assistant - enables users and organizations to interact with their data and receive answers to the business questions in plain English without having to navigate through reports or dashboards. The AI assistant also creates visualizations or an entire dashboard, with just one natural language interaction. In Cognos Analytics, you can also use AI technology to help you explain your dashboard or to find some information that you may not have identified by yourself that explains data in natural language and find key drivers. It truly enhances the self-service experience in the product.
Dashboards – Dashboards have come a long way since its inception in the product from earlier releases. The team has been focused on providing a flexible and powerful interface for both consumers and authors. Dashboards can contain reporting objects, visualizations and natural language insights. With every release, there are enhancements added to improve the overall usability and intuitiveness of Cognos Dashboards.
Reporting – Cognos Analytics is known for its enterprise reporting capability allowing customers to produce highly customizable content and to distribute in multiple formats. 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. The reporting interface can also be customized to provide a tailored user interface for different types of users. There are constant improvements added to reporting with each release in the areas of visualizations, performance, report interactivity and usability and many more. If you have any confusion around the usage of Reports vs Dashboards or Reports + Dashboards?, give this a read.
Modelling – Data modeling is the foundation of producing useful analytical content. In Cognos Analytics, Data modules is a web-based modelling tool that is highly intuitive and is accessible to an average user. It enables users to create a trusted, easy to use business model for self-service analytics and reporting, that is enriched with the key calculations the business needs. The majority of the features users had in Framework Manager are already available in Data Modules today. Our team is working hard to shrink the current gap between the two modelling tools available within Cognos Analytics.
Extensions –Cognos Analytics provides a variety of ways to assign extensions based on roles and groups. This allows users to have different customizations available to them in the user interface once they are logged in. The content can also be extended in many other ways such as using Javascript in reports. Here are some details on using JavaScript in Cognos Analytics.
Access to new data sources- Compatibility with latest technology including new data sources and new ways of connecting with data sources such as using REST APIs.
Increased efficiency and improved performance – After the upgrade, you will notice that the difference in performance becomes quite significant, especially when it comes to handling large data sets and optimising dashboard performance. The team has put a lot of work in this aera of ensuring the data refresh is very quick when consuming data assets in Cognos Analytics. There are also new features added to tune the servers performance.
Stability – The new version of Cognos Analytics is already being used by so many organizations and they have already upgraded so we know that the old repositories when upgraded do work and the old issues have been resolved.
End of IBM Cognos Query Studio, Analysis Studio, and Cognos Workspace - The release 11.2.4.is the final release that includes IBM Cognos Query Studio, IBM Cognos Analysis Studio, and IBM Cognos Workspace. The customers can migrate their users and workloads to the modern components such as reports and dashboards. Query Studio and Analysis Studio assets do continue to render automatically in Cognos report viewer without recreation. There is a feature developed to support the bulk conversion of assets to Cognos reports. To get more details, you can visit this blog written by Rachel.
LTSR vs Innovation stream – The product teams are constantly working on releasing new enhancements for the products in market. Its crucial to stay current with the innovation stream. New releases include new and improved features that increase efficiency. We recommend the organizations to have a timely upgrade program to get into a habit of continuous upgrade process. Upgrades can often help to reduce time, effort and resources spent on daily, repetitive tasks, freeing up employees.
We understand upgrading any software can be a challenge, but we are confident that the benefits of running the latest version would provide efficiencies in streamlined workflows, increased performance and improved insights. You can learn about the features of Cognos Analytics 12.0 release by visiting the documentation page. IBM Cognos Analytics Upgrade Central has a lot of useful resources to help with this project.