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Case study · Cognos

A repeatable Cognos upgrade, minus the nightmare.

How a Farm Credit System bank turned Cognos upgrades and audits into routine, low-risk work.

Financing for agribusiness and rural infrastructure across all 50 U.S. states
LMProfessional headshot
Lindy McDonald
IT Data Platform, CoBank
700
reports validated for upgrade, automatically
5
Cognos environments under control
Single
version of truth for every audit
The challenge

CoBank runs its operational and financial reporting on Cognos, across five environments (Dev, Test 1, Test 2, UAT, and Production), serving 600 business users. Upgrading Cognos meant confirming that hundreds of reports still worked on the new version. Finding the broken ones by hand would have been, in the team's words, a nightmare. As a frequently audited financial institution, they also needed fast, defensible answers about who changed what.

The solution

CoBank leveraged its existing Motio investment for the upgrade. Following Motio's guidance, they stood up sandbox environments, one on the old Cognos version, one on the new, then cloned test cases across, ran them, and immediately surfaced which reports had issues. For audits, Motio's repository became their single version of truth.

MotioCI for upgrades is a game-changer. If we had to find all our reports with issues manually, it would just be a nightmare.

Lindy McDonald · IT Data Platform, CoBank
The results
A repeatable upgrade process that saved significant time and effort, and is now the template for future upgrades
Instant identification of reports with issues across the estate
Data accepted as a single version of the truth in Cognos
Full change history of any Cognos object, making audits far easier

Having version control gives clear visibility of not just the core promotion, but who did it, what they did, and makes the audit possibility easier.

Sandeep Anand · Director of Data Platform, CoBank

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