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An Intuitive Clean Out: How Organizing Photos Relates to a Cognos Upgrade

I got a notification on my phone that my storage space was running dangerously low. This has happened before, and I was not looking forward to spending Saturday sorting through my phone and deleting stuff before I could use the camera feature again. So I clicked on the notification, saw this, and took a screenshot:

Cool. So my phone will show me which files I haven’t used in a while, and also which files are duplicates? And the files that are so large, they are worth taking a closer look at? The neat thing is, my phone didn’t just delete them without my permission. It gave me the ability to sort through what it suggested, and make my own decisions. Because to my Samsung, it may look like the same picture, but I know one is taken before my cat woke up from a nap, and one was right after.

Believe it or not, we have this feature in MotioCI. It’s called the Inventory Module. The Inventory Module is run periodically to help you determine which of your IBM Cognos reports are duplicates, which are more complex and therefore likely to break in an upgrade/slow down your environment, and which haven’t been used in a while.

For my phone, having all these unused files and duplicates photos meant I couldn’t add any more. For your Cognos environment, it means you have a slew of unused reports/files clogging up your environment. You can ignore them, sure. But once you need to revert content, that puts you sorting through content you once thought prudent to save, but has turned into unnecessary content until you get what you need.

The new visualization in Cognos 11 will help you better understand where the best place to start your modernization is. We recommend running the Inventory Module before your Cognos upgrade, so you can only migrate the necessary, helpful reports with you. But we also want you to run periodically to improve your way of working in Cognos.

The Inventory Module helps your Cognos environment to keep clean and orderly. And if you think of it, the Inventory Module is easier in Cognos than it is on my phone. Because in Cognos, I don’t have to delete any cat photos.

Want to learn more about the Inventory Module? Contact Us, and say that Lisa sent you!

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As the BI space evolves, organizations must take into account the bottom line of amassing analytics assets.
The more assets you have, the greater the cost to your business. There are the hard costs of keeping redundant assets, i.e., cloud or server capacity. Accumulating multiple versions of the same visualization not only takes up space, but BI vendors are moving to capacity pricing. Companies now pay more if you have more dashboards, apps, and reports. Earlier, we spoke about dependencies. Keeping redundant assets increases the number of dependencies and therefore the complexity. This comes with a price tag.
The implications of asset failures differ, and the business’s repercussions can be minimal or drastic.
Different industries have distinct regulatory requirements to meet. The impact may be minimal if a report for an end-of-year close has a mislabeled column that the sales or marketing department uses, On the other hand, if a healthcare or financial report does not meet the needs of a HIPPA or SOX compliance report, the company and its C-level suite may face severe penalties and reputational damage. Another example is a report that is shared externally. During an update of the report specs, the low-level security was incorrectly applied, which caused people to have access to personal information.
The complexity of assets influences their likelihood of encountering issues.
The last thing a business wants is for a report or app to fail at a crucial moment. If you know the report is complex and has a lot of dependencies, then the probability of failure caused by IT changes is high. That means a change request should be taken into account. Dependency graphs become important. If it is a straightforward sales report that tells notes by salesperson by account, any changes made do not have the same impact on the report, even if it fails. BI operations should treat these reports differently during change.
Not all reports and dashboards fail the same; some reports may lag, definitions might change, or data accuracy and relevance could wane. Understanding these variations aids in better risk anticipation.

Marketing uses several reports for its campaigns – standard analytic assets often delivered through marketing tools. Finance has very complex reports converted from Excel to BI tools while incorporating different consolidation rules. The marketing reports have a different failure mode than the financial reports. They, therefore, need to be managed differently.

It’s time for the company’s monthly business review. The marketing department proceeds to report on leads acquired per salesperson. Unfortunately, half the team has left the organization, and the data fails to load accurately. While this is an inconvenience for the marketing group, it isn’t detrimental to the business. However, a failure in financial reporting for a human resource consulting firm with 1000s contractors that contains critical and complex calculations about sickness, fees, hours, etc, has major implications and needs to be managed differently.

Acknowledging that assets transition through distinct phases allows for effective management decisions at each stage. As new visualizations are released, the information leads to broad use and adoption.
Think back to the start of the pandemic. COVID dashboards were quickly put together and released to the business, showing pertinent information: how the virus spreads, demographics affected the business and risks, etc. At the time, it was relevant and served its purpose. As we moved past the pandemic, COVID-specific information became obsolete, and reporting is integrated into regular HR reporting.
Reports and dashboards are crafted to deliver valuable insights for stakeholders. Over time, though, the worth of assets changes.
When a company opens its first store in a certain area, there are many elements it needs to understand – other stores in the area, traffic patterns, pricing of products, what products to sell, etc. Once the store is operational for some time, specifics are not as important, and it can adopt the standard reporting. The tailor-made analytic assets become irrelevant and no longer add value to the store manager.