IBM Customer Experience Suite and Cognos Business Analytics

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1 Introduction Business Analytics combine business intelligence, financial performance and strategy management, analytical applications and predictive analytics. These four areas leaders, managers and strategists with insight into their organization, their customers as well as their markets. The current economic conditions and business environment create significant new challenges for delivering and integrating business analytics with other capabilities such as collaboration and social networking. According to a recent report from the IBM Institute for Business Value... today's business environment is increasingly complex and uncertain, with organizations facing increased global interconnectedness, accelerated industry transformation, growing volumes of data and rapidly evolving customer preferences. 1 Achieving success in the current environment requires organizations to successfully deliver business analytics in a way that addresses global interconnectedness, industry transformation and rapidly evolving customer preferences. When When Insight is Not Enough Meeting User Expectations However, successful creation of business analytic capabilities will provide insight and understanding, but will not be sufficient to achieve successful delivery and integration with other capabilities. Organizations need a way to deliver business analytics to users who are increasingly mobile and who expect the same user experience at work that they have become accustomed to in their private lives. 1 After the Crisis: What now? By Saul J. Berman, Richard Christner and Ragna Bell. IBM Institute for Business Value 1

2 Meeting these user expectations will require a more expansive model that delivers Business Analytic results, provides mechanisms for collaboration and integrates with social networks to create an exceptional web experience. This experience must be consistent whether the user is a traditional desktop user or is accessing the information through a mobile or other non-traditional device. Exceptional web experiences provided by the IBM Customer Experience Suite and robust business analytics from IBM can combine to provide organizations with the leading edge business analytics including collaboration and web presentation capabilities required to succeed in today's demanding business environment. Leading the Way in Exceptional Web Experiences In order to help customers meet their exceptional web experience goals in the most efficient and flexible manner possible, IBM has recently released a new offering that is designed to help organizations create highly engaging, personalized, and differentiated web experiences. This new offering is called IBM Customer Experience Suite. With the IBM Customer Experience Suite, organizations can: Create highly personalized customer interactions by analyzing and then adapting to the preferences, behaviors, location, products owned, device, and sentiments of each visitor. Support conversations with and between customers through online communities. Empower business owners to manage the creation and delivery of content, rich media, and campaigns. Deliver rich and engaging experiences without sacrificing flexibility, scalability, or security Compose seamless Web experiences by connecting into the necessary back-end applications, commerce solutions, social media sites, and cloudbased services. Offer consistent experiences across multiple online channels. If you are looking to add business analytics capabilities to your web experience platform, then IBM offers a full range of business analytics capabilities including IBM Cognos a market-leading business intelligence (BI) platform. IBM offers capabilities out-of-the-box that make it easy to surface BI reports with the Customer Experience Suite. In addition, using the integration capabilities with Customer Experience Suite, BI data can be seamlessly integrated into the web experience. 2

3 Leading the Way to Business Analytics Business Analytics solutions from IBM deliver complete, consistent and accurate insight that decision-makers trust to improve business performance. IBM Business Analytic solutions solutions provide actionable insights into current performance, and the ability to predict future outcome as follows. Business Intelligence Business intelligence connects people with information in an easy-to-use way so they can make better decisions. With BI software you can: Set targets, see results and understand what drives the numbers. Identify trends that may be benefits or threats. Take action with a common context for decision-making across every department. Identify and analyze opportunities and trends. Predictive Analytics solutions help an organization anticipate change so that you can plan and carry out strategies that improve outcomes. By applying predictive analytics solutions to data you already have, your organization can uncover unexpected patterns and associations and develop models to guide front-line interactions. Financial Performance and Strategy Management solutions help organizations to Link financial and operational plans through driver-based models. Guarantee the quality and accuracy of financial numbers for timely, sustainable compliance. Track performance against strategic objectives. Perform what-if scenario modeling and create flexible rolling forecasts. Replace rigid budgets with continuous planning daily, weekly, or monthly. IBM Cognos Analytic Applications are packaged business analysis and reporting solutions that provide line-of-business professionals with actionable, crossfunctional insight drawn from information locked in ERPs and other data sources. This powerful business analysis software offers an integrated view of performance across business functions and departments. Following easy-to-use, self-serve prompts, users can generate reports quickly, driving smarter decisions and outcomes better aligned with business strategy. New reporting content can be added and configured easily, minimizing the demand on IT resources. 3

4 Business Intelligence in Context Integrating Cognos with the Customer Experience Suite WebSphere Portal provides the integration platform that allows business intelligence to be combined with collaboration tools (electronic forms, and instant messaging), content management, social networking and information from other core systems such as ERP' and CRM systems. WebSphere Portal supports two methodologies for integrating dashboards and other business analytics reports: Using Cognos WSRP Portlets for WebSphere Portal Creating Dashboards using the WebSphere Dashboard Framework BI Builders for Cognos Integrating Cognos WSRP Portlets with WebSphere Portal Cognos has written and published out of the box WSRP-compliant portlets for WebSphere Portal. These portlets present Cognos reports in the WebSphere Portal. The portlets are included with Cognos and are available to install as part of the Cognos installation media. Utilizing the WSRP Portlets to Integrate Business Analytics to the Portal provides the following benefits: Portlet-to-portlet communication This feature allows users to select an object in the Navigator or Search portlet and have this object rendered in the Cognos Viewer portlet. Customization and personalization Cognos portlets can be customized to provide a slightly different look-and-feel. For example, default reports and folders can be specified reducing the amount of clicks necessary for the user to view a report. Additionally with the Navigator and Search, options can be specified to show more or less information and actions for each user. Extensibility through the SDK The Extended Applications portlet allows users to build their own portlet using existing open sourced samples. This is ideal for users to build powerful portlets to meet their custom business logic and requirements. WSRP Support The Cognos portlets conform to the WSRP standard and use this standard protocol when communicating with the Cognos 8 server. Infrastructure consolidation Allows organizations to leverage the same high availability portal environment for BI that they use for other uses. 4

5 Cognos WSRP Portlets Let Users Search, Navigate, and View Reports Using the WebSphere Dashboard Framework Second, the WebSphere Dashboard Framework can be utilized to create native WebSphere Portal dashboards using Cognos reports. The Dashboard Framework includes builders that leverage Cognos APIs to surface Cognos reports or information within Portal applications Utilizing Dashboard Framework based dashboards allows organizations to richly integrate data from BI sources into composite applications. Data can display in the context that makes most sense for the end user. A single dashboard can display information from a range of information sources and core data systems. And Portal administrators can leverage uniform tooling, look and feel to manipulate BI data in Portal applications. 5

6 What's more, dashboards built using the WebSphere Dashboard Framework can be written once, then deployed to a range of client environments WebSphere Portal within the IBM Customer Experience Suite Sametime Instant Messaging Client PDAs or Mobile Devices For organizations challenged to provide business analytics in a context that meets the increasing demands of sophisticated users, the IBM Customer Experience Suite combined with Cognos provide the platform to do so. 6

7 Why IBM? Why might you consider IBM for helping you to deliver exceptional online experiences? IBM is one of the few vendors with all of the technology, innovations and services needed to support a truly exceptional online experience. IBM delivers best-in-class, award-winning, proven, scalable, and agile software, including Portal software. Web content management tools. Social and real-time communication capabilities. Search. Personalization. Marketing tools. Integration capabilities. Mobile device support. Real-time and predictive analytics. And more. With our technology, integration expertise, and industry expertise including industry templates we can help you deliver gorgeous sites with the scalability, flexibility, and manageability needed for today s fast-changing planet. If you re ready to take your online experience to the next level and keep it there look no further than IBM. For more information To learn more about the Customer Experience Suite and IBM Project Northstar, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/northstar Copyright IBM Corporation 2010 Produced in the United States of America September, 2010 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo and ibm.com are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol ( or ), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Webat Copyright and trademark information at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products and services do notimply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. 7