What’s New in IBM Cognos Insight 10.1.1?

1. Percentage of Total Calculations
2. Calculations in Parent
3. Time Dimension Import
4. Chart Interaction
5. Improved Usability Features
a. Simplified Terminology
b. Access to Formatting
c. Keyboard Shortcuts
6. Guided Import
7. IBM Cognos Insight Trial Edition

Percentage of Total Calculations
Percent of Total Calculations is a view option that enables business users to see their data reflected in a meaningful way when the scale of data makes comparisons more difficult – while the exception highlighting afforded by the compare calculation enables users to spot issues. Viewing data as a Percent of Total also quickly implies the scale of the issue. A poorly performing business unit, product, or time period is less important if it typically accounts for only a small fraction of the overall business. A favorite for the Excel user, this is a common requirement for business analysts evaluating year over year, quarter over quarter growth, etc…

Calculations in Parent
With regards to Calculations in Parent, in the previous version, when you created a calculation the value of the calculation was automatically included in any parent summaries. The default is now to exclude the calculation value from any parent summaries. If you in fact did want to include the calculation value in the parent summary, you could simply edit the calculation and choose the option to include calculation value.

Time Dimension Import
In Cognos Insight 10.1, manual creation of time hierarchies for year, quarter and month was required (or it was necessary that the data was already provided as such in the source). The time dimension is an important and regularly used dimension for analysis that users will no longer have to spend time creating and re-creating. Automatic creation makes workspace authoring faster, gets users to the point analyzing data quicker, and addresses this gap in the previous version of Cognos Insight. This will also improve the overall user experience during Cognos Insight evaluations.

Chart Interaction
Leveraging the competitive differentiator of write back at the core of TM1, this feature enables the business user to rapidly prototype growth trends, make adjustments, or evaluate investments. Consider a zero-sum budgeting problem of number of resources, or dollars, available, and using the one-two punch of holding totals and adjusting children to evaluate multiple investment choices. Similarly, where a fixed or committed project cannot be affected, holding that project while adjusting all others through simple lever pulls on a column or bar chart.

Improved Usability Features
Much of the terminology that is used in Cognos Insight is based on concepts that are known to users of IBM Cognos TM1. These changes, though subtle, remove terms such as ‘Member’ from commonly accessed menu items in the Cognos Insight UI. This is done in order to make the experience more understandable for all users.

With regards to Access To Formatting, moving the ability to format data to it’s own menu item, makes editing the display of values within the workspace easier to find. Formatting measures and data within a Cognos Insight workspace is a commonly used task that will be required by all users.

Guided Import
For external data files that contain crosstabs, Cognos Insight automatically brings up the Guided Import wizard. For this release though, Cognos Insight is now more able to parse crosstabs. It is very clear to the end user that they are importing a file that contains a crosstab and that they will be redirected to the Guided Import.

Caption Support is important because business users will frequently have data that is assigned a business key, unique identifier, or ID, and this will relate directly to an available name or description column that is what will be used for analysis.

Providing a simple way to add this identification, and further, a way to ensure that they need to create some additional process to support non-unique captions, simplifies the import experience greatly.

IBM Cognos Insight Trial Edition
Cognos Insight 10.1.1 is now available for a 30-day trial edition available. This trial edition is available from Analyticszone.com and has most of the functionality available in the standard edition with the following exceptions

• Cognos Insight 30 Day Trial only supports xls and csv file import, and not ODBC or Cognos reports or TM1 Cube Views
• Workspaces created in IBM Cognos Insight 30 Day Trial cannot be shared or published to IBM Cognos BI, IBM Cognos TM1 or IBM Cognos Express servers
• The banner at the top of the Cognos Insight 30 Day Trial interface clearly indicates that a trial edition of Cognos Insight is being used