IBM Cognos Analytics Overview

In an effort to better understand our data we started using this tool after trying a couple of other tools. Out of the box the tool is relatively easy to use. The interface is user friendly, and depending on your previous experience, is relatively easy to learn. Implementation is not too difficult, depending on your environment and knowledge, but make sure you have the computing power. The tool is pretty rich in features, and can be used daily as easily as any other tool. Able to analyze a variety of datasets. Many reporting features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My company is a non-profit healthcare delivery institute. We have electronic health records that capture patient data from the clinical field through applications. The clinical data stored in the database is being secondarily used for scientific research and quality improvement. We adopted IBM Cognos as a tool to visualize data and develop web-based deliverable charts. It has been implemented through at enterprise-level in the whole organization.
Web-based authoring environment is slow, compared to Desktop based environment. It gets slower if the size of data gets bigger. Congas is best when we create reports using coded data based on relational databases. Since a lot of clinical data are unstructured formatted, it may be required of good data wrangling function to include them into the reports. Chart types and look and feel configuration flexibility are limited, especially compared to competitors such as Tableau. They are not terribly ugly, but not faulty looking with the default setting.