Bi concept and Cognos module functions

The concept of business intelligence (BI) has been put forward since 1958 and has been widely used in various industries for a long time, during this period, technologies and application environments related to business intelligence have become more and more mature. Different business intelligence vendors have also provided product series that can solve a full set of business intelligence solutions, this article briefly introduces the related concepts and technologies of business intelligence, and introduces the related products of IBM Cognos. Readers can refer to this article to use Cognos to build business intelligence solutions.

 

What is Business Intelligence
In summary of historical sales records, Walmart's Sales Department found that beer and diapers were sold much higher each weekend, is this a coincidence or is there a definite inevitable factor behind this phenomenon? The sales staff launched a survey and found that every weekend, housewives of children would ask their husbands to buy their children diapers for a week, these husbands will inevitably choose beer they love to drink so that they can celebrate with friends during the rugby and basketball games on weekends. After finding the cause, the Sales Department took measures to bundle beer and diapers in supermarkets every weekend. This led to an increase in beer and diapers sales.
This is a classic story, but it clearly expresses the concept of business intelligence. From the perspective of the development history of informatics, in the early days, all the data of an enterprise, policies are stored on paper media. With the development and application of ERP software, the data is transferred to the database and can be processed by programs. As more and more data is stored in the database, people began to look for value in data, and business intelligence was born. Business Intelligence is the process of finding value in a large amount of data.
Business Intelligence has three products: analysis reports, basis and method of statistical analysis, and data mining.
• The analysis report describes and summarizes the facts that have occurred. It is based on facts. For example, the sales volume of a certain department in a company in the four quarters of 2008 is 50 thousand yuan and 70 thousand yuan respectively, 0.1 million yuan and 30 thousand yuan.
• Statistical analysis is performed based on the rules of previously associated data. The premise of prediction is human assumption. For example, there is a certain relationship between the event to occur and historical data.
• Data Mining is a process in which computers analyze the stored data based on a model, identify the associations hidden between the data, and analyze the potential impact of these associations on the results, to help people make decisions.
Here, we use an example from a telecommunications company to illustrate the product of business intelligence described above:
• A telecom company analyzes and stores customer data to display the annual consumption quotas of different types of customers, as well as the investment and income comparison charts of various departments. These are all analysis reports.
• The trend chart of the customer's historical monthly consumption records shows that the monthly consumption quota of some high-end customers is gradually reduced. According to the analysis, the customer will be lost as the trend develops. This is a statistical analysis.
• Telecom companies have launched many new businesses, but their applications are not ideal. Most people will think that people do not like these new businesses, after analyzing all the customer data that has applied for and has not applied for the business, the computer finds that the group of people who have not applied for the business is at the age level and the educational level is not concentrated, however, their residences or work areas are concentrated in some areas. According to the investigation, new businesses can only be handled in the business office, the computer analysis shows that these regions do not have the business office of the telecommunications company, and the problem is found, telecom companies immediately invested in capital to develop two portals, voice and website self-service, to promote their new business. This is data mining.
Business Intelligence can be compared to a factory. It uses a large amount of data as raw materials and has two production lines. One is an information production line that produces analysis reports, data queries, and online analysis and processing, data Visualization and other products, the other is the knowledge production line, which will produce: Data Mining. The customers of these products are business decision makers, so the role of business intelligence is decision support.

Enterprise Data flows from the source database to the Data Warehouse through the ETL process, and then organizes the data in the data warehouse into a multi-dimensional cube model through data modeling.
Data Query can directly query data in a data warehouse. analysis reports can generate reports and charts based on data in a data warehouse or cube. OLAP analysis is a flexible and real-time analysis of data in cubes. Data Visualization presents data in a data warehouse or cube in an easy-to-understand manner.
Data mining can be used to analyze data in a data warehouse or even the source database. By exploring hidden relationships between a large amount of data, the answer is a question.
The basic module of Cognos is a product between data visualization and analysis reports.

 

Data Warehouse Introduction
A data warehouse is a collection of theme-oriented, integrated, and unchanged data that changes over time. It is significantly different from a transactional database.
The data organization method of transactional databases is transaction-oriented and designed to facilitate transactional operations. For example, in an enterprise's ERP system, employee information is dispersed in some database entities, the employee's age is stored in the employee's basic information table to facilitate the employee's entry process operation data. The employee's salary information is stored in the employee's income table to facilitate the employee's payroll process operation data. In data warehouses, data is subject-oriented, and the basic information of all employees is stored together for analysis and query.
Transaction databases are generally scattered in different places with different regions, which can effectively improve the speed of data access, but the data in the data warehouse is centralized, data in different regions is collected to the same data warehouse.
The record value in the transaction database can be changed, while the data in the data warehouse cannot be updated. Only the ETL process can inject new data into the warehouse, for example, if an employee's job department is m in March May and is adjusted to department N in March October, the Department corresponding to this employee is N in the transaction database, there are at least three related records in the data warehouse. In March May, the employee's Department was m, and in March October, the employee's Department was n. In March October, the employee made a department adjustment.
The databases used by ERP software are usually transactional databases, while the databases used in business intelligence systems are generally data warehouses.
Theme-oriented: Functional industry business features
Integrated: various types of source databases

 

ETL Introduction
Extract, transform, and load)
ETL refers to the process of injecting data from the source database into the data warehouse, where data is transformed to a certain extent:
• Data format conversion, including decimal point conversion and date format conversion.
• The conversion of data organization forms converts the entity relationship diagrams stored in transaction databases into star or snowflake models in data warehouses.

 

OLAP Introduction
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is an online analysis of data in cubes. It can be used to analyze chunks, convert data, and segment data. Data in a data cube can be called a measurement. Dimensions can be classified. For example, time is a dimension. The first level can be year, the second level can be month, and the third level can be day. We can view the year-based information. By drilling down, we can further analyze the month-based information.
Data Query, data visualization, and Analysis Report
These three products can be seen as three products of the information production line in the Business Intelligence Factory:
• Data Query allows you to fill in the facts and conditions you want to query and display the results in the form of reports or charts. However, it has many similarities with the SQL query language, for example: you must set what to query, where to query, the condition and the form in which to display the query results. This is the most basic application of business intelligence products.
• The analysis report shows the data in professional reports or charts. You can set a filter to filter the data, data organization form and filter are constructed.
• Data Visualization presents data in richer styles, including pie charts, density charts, distribution charts, and maps.
Data Mining Overview
Data mining is the only product of the knowledge production line in the Business Intelligence factory. It can analyze the relationship between data and discover the knowledge hidden behind the data under the user-specified model, however, the premise is that the user tells the computer where to analyze the data in a dataset, what characteristics of the data to be analyzed, and what operations to perform in case of certain results. This is a data mining model. Common data mining technologies include: basic understanding of memory, neural networks, genetic algorithms, and cluster detection. Of course, you can also design simple mining algorithms by simply classifying, aggregating, and associating data.

 

Cognos business intelligence product introduction
The IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence series provides customizable and comprehensive business intelligence services based on the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA. You can use the IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence software to monitor, analyze, and predict your business, in addition, users can easily deploy corresponding services on a centralized platform to meet specific needs. This modular deployment architecture allows users to easily expand or modify system functions to meet different business intelligence needs.
The figure below shows the products involved in the business intelligence solution. Cognos has many advantages in data warehouse management and data display. Here we will give a brief introduction and analysis of some products in Cognos 8.4:
Cognos Business Intelligence Server
The Cognos Business Intelligence server is the basis for providing business intelligence services for each functional module of the IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence series software. It initializes the runtime environment of each function module of Cognos and the connection and setting of content databases, the context information such as the connection and settings of the user authentication server. You can select an enterprise-level application server to build a Cognos Business Intelligence server. Cognos provides standard configuration software to provide users with a friendly editing interface and generate packages that can run on the enterprise-level application server. Supported enterprise-level application servers include Tomcat and IBM WebSphere Application Server.
Data Manager
Data Manager is an ETL tool in the Cognos Series. It can inject source data from the transaction database to the Data Warehouse. The predecessor of Data Manager is demo-stream, both of which are Windows-based graphical tools, you can create data sources (relational databases or files) and target data warehouses, and edit data conversion and aggregation rules. The generated packages can be deployed on containers for regular operation, to achieve data aggregation. Cognos does not focus on ETL tools. We can also use SQW (SQL warehousing) of DWe or even manually write ETL code as an alternative to ETL tools.
Transformer
Transformer is a tool used to integrate data from data sources and establish models. Users can use it to create power cubes, that is, the data cubes we mentioned. You can use transformer to analyze data sources, create dimensions and measurements, design dimension levels, create data cubes, and set the data update frequency in data cubes. Data cubes are the basis of OLAP analysis. After being published by framework manager, it can be referenced by Cognos's report production tool to generate reports of various styles.
Framework Manager
Framework manager is a tool that organizes and publishes metadata in a data warehouse or cube to The Cognos design environment. That is to say, if you need to design a report in Cognos report studio, the data in the data warehouse must be published to the Cognos design environment (the content database of the Cognos Business Intelligence server) by the Framework manger.
You can create a project in framework manager and import the data description of the data warehouse or cube. Framework manager automatically converts the data description into a query topic and displays it in the project. You can also customize other query topics based on the existing query topic, or hierarchical dimensions and measurements associated with dimensions. Finally, you can choose to package the query subject or dimension metrics and publish them to the Cognos design environment.
The data cube file generated in transformer contains fact data from the data source, but the cube logical model created in framework Manager (composed of multi-level dimensions and related measurements) the actual data is not included. The two can be used as the basis for OLAP analysis.

Cognos connection
After the Cognos Bi server is successfully installed, we can access the Cognos connection through the web for design and management operations.
You can access the content management interface through the Management Cognos content link. You can configure the data source connected to the Cognos server, set the user's access permissions, and view server actions.
Through the my home link, you can access the main Cognos operation interface, browse public folders and content in my folders, and customize your own display interface.
Query Studio
Click the query my data link on the Cognos connection page to go to the query studio operation interface.
Query studio is a simple tool for users to generate self-help reports. After selecting a package released by framework manager, you can organize the metadata in the package or convert and operate the metadata to generate reports or charts. You can also set advanced operations such as filters and sorting for reports. Query studio is easy to operate, but it can only produce simple reports, which can be used to analyze data published through framework manager at will. In query Studio, the user can see the logical organization of data in the operation panel on the left of the interface, but cannot see the data (for example, the user can see in the Operation Panel that the HR entity has an item called salary, but he cannot see the value of salary for each user), but when the user drags the entity in the Operation board into the report page, the data can be immediately presented to the user without running the report.
Report Studio
Click the create professional reports link on the Cognos connection page To Go To The report studio operation interface.
Report studio is a tool designed for users to prepare complex reports. Before entering report studio, we also need to select a data packet published through framework manager. Data in data packets can be displayed to users in different formats as needed. The editing and display functions are much more powerful than query studio.
Report studio can display multiple types of charts in the same report. It also supports Viewing Reports in HTML, XML, PDF, and other formats.
Analysis Studio
Click the analyze my business link on the Cognos connection page to go to the analysis studio operation interface.
Analysis studio is a tool designed for users to prepare complex reports. Before entering analysis studio, we also need to select a data packet published through framework manager. The multi-level dimensions generated in framework manager and the associated metrics must be included in the data cube model. You can use analysis studio to analyze data in a cube model, such as data slicing, drill-up and drill-down, block splitting, and conversion.
Metric Studio
Click the Manage My metrics link on the Cognos connection page to go To the metrics studio operation interface.
Metric studio is a tool used to set monitoring values for a specified metrics. It can implement the scorecard function. For example, we set some thresholds for the number of people in an HR report, metric studio will observe whether the actual number of employees has reached the predefined threshold value each time the relevant report is run, thus triggering some events that can be defined in event studio. You can also insert instances written in metric studio in the report design tool. For example, in a report, the actual number of employees and the number of employees in the plan are displayed as two metrics in the chart.

Event Studio
Click the Manage My events link on the Cognos connection page to enter the operation interface of event studio.
Event studio allows you to set conditions for an event and relevant actions of the event, such as sending an email, generating a report, and publishing a message on the connection.

IBM Cognos 8 go!
The above is a standard service provided by the Cognos Business Intelligence series software. To meet more diverse needs and more users, cognos provides many enhanced functions based on the original business intelligence series software. IBM Cognos 8 go! The series of software is a typical example of these enhancements. by enhancing the original business intelligence services, IBM Cognos 8 go! It allows users to monitor, analyze, and predict Business Development anytime, anywhere and freely using tools. IBM Cognos 8 go! Search provides users with the ability to search for data in the Cognos server or the data in the data source connected to them. IBM Cognos 8 go! Mobile provides a way for mobile users to access the Cognos Business Intelligence server from mobile terminals. IBM Cognos 8 go! Office allows users to access the Cognos Business Intelligence server through Microsoft's office software to create business reports, analyze and predict business data. IBM Cognos 8 go! Dashboard allows you to create a dynamic and interactive dashboard on a flash-based interface. Using these enhanced features does not require a new business intelligence operating environment. you can install and deploy these functions in the existing Cognos business intelligence environment under the Cognos business intelligence product framework of the service-oriented architecture.

IBM Cognos 8 go! Search
IBM Cognos 8 go! Search is a Java-based software that provides a complete search service. It applies to all data in the Cognos server and the data sources it connects to (such as relational databases, data warehouses, data cubes, data Files) to create an index, not only to search for model data in the Cognos server, but also to search for results that are not simple string matching and locating, instead, a sequence of results is provided based on the similarity of user requirements.
If you need to view the distribution of business data, you can quickly find the most relevant or important report or analysis report, so that you do not need to view all reports, this saves both time and labor.
At the same time, you can make full use of all the assets deployed on the Cognos Business Intelligence server, such as reports, dashboards, and events. IBM Cognos 8 go! Search can be integrated into any enterprise-level application server, search engine, portal website, etc. You can also execute search commands on the Cognos Business Intelligence server.
IBM Cognos 8 go! Mobile
IBM Cognos 8 go! Mobile is a software designed for users who have little time to access the company's business indicators and development trends through a computer network, he provides a client that can be installed on a mobile terminal to access the Cognos server, operate and analyze commercial data in the data source, and display related reports and dashboards.
The client software installed on the mobile terminal implements encryption control during data transmission on the same server, and supports offline operations. IBM Cognos 8 go! Mobile also uses the unique touch screen function of mobile terminals to improve users' operation habits. In order not to affect the performance and speed of data display, it can also effectively compress data and optimize the data display format.
The installation and upgrade of the client can be controlled uniformly through the Cognos Business Intelligence server, thus reducing the unnecessary work of IT maintenance personnel.
IBM Cognos 8 go! Office
In the actual production environment, you often need to run and generate reports on the web, and extract some of the information to Microsoft Office documents (such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint ), if the data in the data warehouse changes, you need to re-run the report and re-edit the Office document.
IBM Cognos 8 go! The office software allows you to directly run and edit reports in the target Office document. If the data in the data warehouse changes, you only need to refresh the Office document to obtain the documents containing the latest data. You can also use the original functions of the office to edit them at will. The management of user and content data is still the responsibility of the Cognos Business Intelligence server, with IBM Cognos 8 go! To create a report in office, you only need to edit the report generation tool from web to Microsoft office software.
IBM Cognos 8 go! Dashboard
Cognos report studio and metric studio can also be used to create a simple business data dashboard. However, a good dashboard design is like a variety of parameter instruments in the Aircraft Cockpit, allowing users to immediately detect changes, quickly take action by understanding the changes.
IBM Cognos 8 go! Dashboard provides a dashboard editing Window Based on the flash interface. You can edit dashboards with diverse display formats and rapid response, enhancing the basic report production function of Cognos.

Other Cognos Products
The previous section introduced Cognos's business intelligence products. IBM Cognos also provides many business intelligence solutions for different industries and applications. For example, IBM Cognos TM1, IBM Cognos planning, IBM Cognos 8 workforce performance, IBM Cognos now! .
IBM Cognos TM1
IBM Cognos TM1 is the only data analysis engine in the industry that can flexibly change as needed. It is easier to deploy and respond faster than other performance management software in the industry.
IBM Cognos TM1 is an independent solution that is not dependent on any other Cognos products, industry rules, data, and data models that are shared by applications integrated with them, IBM Cognos TM1 responds more quickly than the Cognos business intelligence service described in the previous section, frequently changing data sources can be quickly reflected in reports without the time-consuming ETL process, and then the data in the data warehouse is displayed in reports, IBM Cognos TM1 optimizes data cube Analysis, Report Editing and generation functions, and enables efficient operation. However, its presentation and analysis functions are not as rich as Cognos business intelligence services, however, compared with the rapid response to frequent changes in data sources, the data presentation function of IBM Cognos TM1 is sufficient to meet the needs of enterprise performance management.
IBM Cognos 8 Planning
IBM Cognos planning is a business intelligence software designed for the financial industry to develop business plans. It is a good helper for enterprise financial analysts to develop plans. It provides users with a simple operation interface to develop business rules and plan distribution, setting metrics and verifying the impact of some hypothetical results on the overall plan can help decision makers transform business strategies into different types of plans, budgets, and execution plans of employees and collaborators.
IBM Cognos now!
Generally, the transaction processing system and the Business Intelligence System are separated. Data in the transaction processing system must be converted to be used by the Business Intelligence System, but IBM Cognos now! It is an operational business intelligence solution. It is usually pre-installed in hardware, software, or virtual machine devices, so it is easy to deploy. You only need to connect the devices to your existing network, and a wide range of data sources (JDBC, files, Web servers, XML, HTTP, etc.) are connected through proxies. The 64-bit parsing server running in the memory can be fast between various data sources, continuously transfer information and concentrate Data in the memory in the form of views or data cubes. IBM Cognos now! The unique high-speed engine obtains and analyzes data in the memory to present the data to the customer in the form of reports or dashboards. IBM Cognos now! Checks the operating data source without interruption and runs for two consecutive weeks.
If you want to analyze your enterprise performance over a long period of time, you can deploy other Cognos products or solutions at the same time, and use the products of the same manufacturer to provide short-term and long-term business intelligence solutions.
IBM Cognos 8 Workforce Performance
IBM Cognos 8 WPF is a business intelligence platform in the Human Resources (HR) field. Based on the IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence software, it also customizes the data model of the human resources industry, and the data warehouse model. The built-in interface with the ERP software data source allows users to easily deploy it in their enterprise operation analysis environment.
IBM Cognos 8 WPF can perform online analysis on human resources-related indicators and drill into detailed transaction data. It can be used for managers, human resources supervisors, the president of the company provides reports of different styles to display data of different levels, and implements Security Authorization and authentication management for data access.
You can obtain the personnel distribution and wage distribution between similar departments through reports generated by IBM Cognos 8 WPF, the performance evaluation and salary comparison of different employees are rich and varied information about human resources.