The business case for Cognos
After understanding all of the technical details behind IBM Cognos Connection, you have to ask yourself why your business users will want this. There are really a few key reasons.
The first is that, by having IBM Cognos Connection as a central source of data and information, your business users do not risk having different Business Intelligence interfaces providing dissimilar information. This is one version of the truth. The benefit really lies in the ability of the business to trust their numbers.
The second benefit is the ease of use. By having all of your reporting, analysis, and planning tools in one centralized location, business users can more easily complete their work. Because the interfaces are similar between each of the tools, there is also a shared learning experience that would not exist if the tools were all spread between distinct systems.
The third and final benefit that we will discuss here is the ease of support. While it is easy to see this as an IT benefit, and not a business benefit, it is actually a benefit to both groups. For the business, having one interface that is maintained means that support issues can all go to one place. With IBM Cognos BI v10.x, you typically see one group owning the product in its entirety. This means one throat to choke, so to speak.
In reality, there are thousands of business cases that can be drawn around a centralized interface for business analytics. However, these are just a few of the key ones that can help IT better understand why business users should be all for Cognos Connection.
