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Case study · Cognos

Agile BI, without losing control.

How the steward of Canada's .CA domain moved to a three-environment, self-service Cognos pipeline.

Steward of the .CA top-level domain on behalf of all Canadians
Jon Coote
Jon Coote
Information Management Team Lead, CIRA
1 → 3
Cognos environments, properly separated
Self-service
governed deployments, no admin bottleneck
Daily
service requests expedited to production
The challenge

As CIRA shifted to an agile methodology, its old Cognos setup couldn't keep up. A single environment handled development, testing, and production, and version control meant duplicating reports named “v1, v2…” with the “final” copy moved to a production folder. That approach bloated the content store, tracked neither author nor changes, covered only reports (not packages or models), and let just one developer work on a version at a time.

The solution

Moving to three environments on Cognos 10.2, CIRA used Motio for deployment and version control with pre-defined change-control procedures. Crucially, BI developers were empowered to deploy from Dev to QA themselves, no more waiting on an admin. Every deployment carried an audit trail of who, what, where, and when, and content could be compared across environments to ensure the right version shipped.

Without a tool like MotioCI, our process using Cognos deployment was cumbersome. To effectively follow our agile methodology, using MotioCI is definitely, definitely a big plus.

Jon Coote · Information Management Team Lead, CIRA
The results
Supported CIRA's agile goals with much quicker response to service requests
Greatly reduced development cycle times through governed self-service deployments
BI content delivered to business users far faster than before
One-click rollback when an issue slipped through testing

After we deploy to production, if something was missed in testing or we have an issue, we can very easily roll back to a previous version using MotioCI.

Jon Coote · Information Management Team Lead, CIRA

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