On September 30th, Hug a Cognos Admin Day™, we hope you hugged and celebrated your beloved, hardworking Cognos admins! In honor of this special day, we would like to recognize an individual Cognos Administrator who has shown exceptional skills and merit, by awarding him with the Cognos Admin Ninja Award. We received many worthy nominations for this award and while it was difficult to choose just one winner, we decided upon Jeff Hanna of Optum. Congratulations, Jeff
Jeff was nominated by not one, but three of his colleagues for the Cognos Admin Ninja Award. Jeff has been a Cognos 
Administrator for 14 years. We learned that Jeff not only has the ability to leap tall buildings in emergency situations, but he also sustains the highest level of performance, perseverance, and flexibility in his role as Senior Cognos Administrator at Optum. Jeff knows Cognos like the back of his hand and seamlessly administers multiple servers running a variety of Cognos product versions. Jeff explained that many of their projects and administrative processes require support well beyond the normal 40-hour work week. Jeff’s colleagues said that he always does an outstanding job and with a pleasant bedside manner, regardless of how demanding the project is. When asked how it felt to win this prestigious Cognos Admin Ninja Award, Jeff said, “It was a rewarding feeling to think others recognized my efforts and took the time to nominate me. Thank you for the recognition!”
We would also like to acknowledge three nominees as honorable mentions for this award:
Tony Lovett of Assimil8.
Tony embodies many Cognos Ninja™-like capabilities such as, stealthily monitoring the behavior & performance of Cognos 
environments, rendering non-performant software, possessing intimate knowledge of an overly complex server configuration, and knowing when to swiftly terminate an unwelcome task. Tony’s team went all out creatively with this clever video nomination. Take a look- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS7yR0vD2ik
Viktor Baranov of MassMutual.
At MassMutual, Viktor is the sole support of three different Cognos environments. He ensures they are maintained and running smoothly for the entire user base of his organization. If anything goes awry, Viktor is on it Ninja-quick, to minimize the outage!
Liam Hicks of Edmonton Police Service.
Liam makes sure his organization gets their BI reports and data delivered on time. EPS delivers around 800 reports every morning. One day, their scheduled jobs did not run. One call to Liam and the problem was solved!
Congratulations to Jeff, Tony, Viktor, Liam, all the nominees, and all of the Cognos Administrators around the world for being awesome and Cognos Ninja-like at what you do!
Set up an annual calendar reminder for Hug a Cognos Admin Day, September 30th, so that you will not forget to do 
something special for your Cognos Administrators each year! More importantly, be sure to take time out of your day every now and then just to say thanks for all of the diligence and long hours your Cognos Admins commit to keeping your BI environments running smoothly.
