IBM Cognos TM1 The Official Guide

The only official guide to IBM Cognos TM1

Deliver timely, accurate, and actionable performance management solutions to users across your enterprise. Filled with expert advice from a team of IBM professionals, IBM Cognos TM1: The Official Guide shows you how to deploy and maintain a dynamic planning, forecasting, and scenario analytic solution. Learn the latest Cognos TM1 10.1 best practices on how to model Cognos TM1 cubes, develop highly agile performance management solutions, generate feature-rich reports, and employ dashboards and scorecards. Securing, sizing, and performance tuning are also covered in this IBM-authorized resource. This book can also be used with former TM1 versions.

• Build Cognos TM1 models with cubes, dimensions, rules, and TurboIntegrator processes
• Load data and establish workflow using the TurboIntegrator
• Model and analyze multidimensional business processes
• Develop applications using Excel and Cognos TM1 Web
• Manage high user volumes with scaling and concurrency
• Assign and enforce roles, privileges, and permissions
• Deliver custom reports to end users through dashboards
• Use KPIs and balanced scorecards to monitor performance

From the Authors

Why We Wrote This Book

It is not surprising that in 25 years, best practices and fantastic ideas of how to use Cognos TM1 have evolved. For many business problems, excellent solutions already exist. We participated in this development process and learned from experienced people. But knowledge about Cognos has been like a patchwork. Only a few sites and communities exist, and most experience has been gained by intuition and trial and error. Every novice has to go the hard way and build solid knowledge from various more or less trustworthy sources. It often takes years to become an expert. We have felt this ourselves: to train our colleagues in the secrets of Cognos TM1 takes time and effort.

Our intention is to increase the speed of the diffusion of Cognos TM1 into the business world. For this, of course, marketing is necessary, but good and comprehensive knowledge is more important. So we want to provide everything that is necessary to work with Cognos TM1 effectively, or at least what we think is necessary to work with it.

The obvious question is: why hasn’t there been a book about Cognos TM1 before now? Perhaps Cognos TM1 has been a tool for insiders. You definitely need critical mass for a book project. However, with Cognos TM1 becoming part of the IBM software family, the time is right: the first comprehensive book is now available.

Who This Book Is For

Who should read this book? Everybody who is interested in increasing their company’s performance can profit from it. External and internal consultants in particular will find a broad range of solutions.

Do you already work with Cognos TM1? Do you want to improve your existing applications? You can find lots of practical tips and tricks for projects and your daily work in this book. If you are a consultant, you can find ideas to improve your service offerings. Are you an implementer or a so-called end user? Although we provide concrete implementation advice, our conceptual proposals help users to understand better what is possible with Cognos TM1. This facilitates the communication between the user and the developers.

Perhaps you plan to use Cognos TM1, or are you simply interested in the core concepts of Cognos TM1? You can see what is possible with a modern multidimensional solution.

This Book Will Help You…

Why should you read this book? We are convinced that you will find what you are searching for:

• A better understanding of how Cognos TM1 works internally
• Techniques for applying Cognos TM1 to the most difficult performance management problems
• A better understanding of the Cognos TM1 tools (including the new ones)
• A better understanding of how to model with Cognos TM1

Although this book has a limited academic orientation, we hope we provide a sufficient explanation of the business background that is necessary to implement the solutions.

We structured this book in three parts. The first part gives an introductory overview of Cognos TM1. What are the typical problems and how can Cognos TM1 address these? You can learn how other companies profited from using Cognos TM1. All tools available for use with Cognos TM1 are briefly introduced.

If you want to get a better understanding of how Cognos TM1 works and how to use the tools, a technical deep dive in the second part of the book provides the necessary insights. For performance optimization, a sound understanding of how Cognos TM1 works internally is necessary. All core concepts are explained in detail.

The last part of the book covers the business solutions. The business requirements drive everything. The best tool can’t help if you don’t understand the business background. We will provide the business background and small, easy-to-understand models. These techniques should help you to solve typical business challenges and can become the foundation of your own solution. We try to span a wide area to cover the intelligent usage of Cognos TM1.