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Post: Cogratulations Jeff Hanna, Winner of the Cognos Admin Ninja Award™

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.

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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.
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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.
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