Leveraging Cognos BI to Support Research (Pre-Award

Leveraging Cognos BI to Support Research (Pre-Award) Reporting:

A Best Practice Approach

Higher Education Virtual Conference 2008

Presenter – John Ewan

Manager Financial Reporting Team, Project Café

(Financial Replacement Initiative)

Over 9 years of business intelligence / data

warehousing experience at prestigious organization

such as Arthur Andersen and MicroStrategy

Served on large and complex implementations such

as the one currently underway at Northwestern

At Northwestern provides oversight to all Cognos related reporting deliverables for the financial system replacement initiative

With massively parallel development activities underway - on-site at Northwestern and offshore in India - John's talent and experience on the management, process, and technical aspects of business intelligence and data warehousing are valuable


Presenter – Rumy Sen

Founder and President of Entigence Corporation,

Strong business-focused technical skills uniquely

positions Entigence to deliver successful solutions

using technologies such as Cognos8

Entigence:

Provides best-practice-based strategic and operational oversight and BI implementation services to Northwestern’s reporting initiative

Consultants have managed the development of multi-tiered business applications using web technologies, relational databases and commercial ERP applications

Entigence has served prestigious institutions such as Northwestern, Brown, George Washington, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill

Entigence is a Cognos Global Partner


Research @ NU

International recognition and pioneering research in genetic medicine, nanotechnology, biochemistry, neuroscience, cancer research, etc.

Annual research budget $1.5 billion, more than $416 million in sponsored research

Hundreds of interdisciplinary teams within Northwestern and partners at Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, and local universities

More than 90 school-based

centers and 20 University

centers on two campuses



Business Needs

University community requires access to pre-award information

Central offices such as Office of Sponsored Research

Schools such as Feinberg School of Medicine

Departments

Research Centers

Reporting needs are wide-ranging

Single and multiple request and award analysis, Principal Investigator analysis, longitudinal analysis

External reporting to sponsors and regulatory authorities

Forecasting and trend analysis

Ad hoc analysis

Reports that cross organizational boundaries for interdisciplinary analysis


Cognos @ NU

Northwestern owns licenses to Cognos8 product suite

Tool selected for all enterprise reporting

Currently used for HR reporting

Cognos8 on Windows with databases on grids

ReportStudio, QueryStudio in production

Plans for AnalysisStudio


Enterprise Applications @ NU

Project Café: Financial Systems Replacement Initiative

PeopleSoft Finance for financial management

InfoEd for proposal tracking

FAMIS for facilities management

InfoEd Reporting

First reporting increment for Cafe

Cognos positioned Café to provide the type of centrally managed and distributed reporting environment that Northwestern requires

Reporting Challenges

Source data highly normalized, not the best scenario for Cognos

Reporting initiative in parallel to implementation of a frequently evolving source application


Immediate Benefits from Cognos

A one-stop reporting site

Organized delivery of standard and ad hoc

reports

Secured access via use of public and private

folders

Ability to group reporting

items into “packages”


Click to edit Master title style

Drag and Drop Ad Hoc

Reporting



Click to edit Master title style

Flexibility through prompted and formatted reports



Challenges

Source application database structures highly normalized while Cognos8 performs most efficiently and predictably with star schemas or dimensional models

Ad hoc reporting is more intuitive with stars

Reports created directly against normalized database had constraints

Difficult to modify or validate

Production constraints impacted reporting and vice-versa

Metadata not easy to comprehend, too many tables and joins


Evolution of Cognos Implementation

Take 1: Create Reports against Source Database

Compressed timeline for delivery of reports

16 real-time reports created against source database

Cognos model very complex, too many tables and joins

No ad hoc reporting

Deadline met successfully


Slowly Moving towards Stars

Take 2: Hybrid Approach

Created “stars” in database through the use of materialized views

Fairly functional

Acceptable performance

Team re-created 13 reports against MVs and left 3 pointing to source database for real-time needs

Issues with MVs

SQL difficult to maintain, easy to break

No metadata for developers

Significant impact as source data structures changed

Slow development cycle


The Best/Recommended Approach

Take 3: ETL and StarsETL = extract, transform, load

Implement data transformation through ETL processes

Oracle Warehouse Builder

Mappings easier to maintain

Metadata available to developers

Shorter development cycle

Cognos performance significantly improved

Issues? None so far with Cognos


Net Results

In three months since release:Over 80 ad hoc reports

17 standard in production and 12 more to be released in February

Reports provide prompts, master-detail and drill functionality

Café functional team and business users are building trust in the content of the reporting platform

Acceptable development cycle


From the Director of Cafe

“I am pleased to announce that we have reached our second major go-live milestone on the project - …Proposal Tracking module viewing access and corresponding reporting out of the Cognos BI tool.

What does this mean? In short, it means that we have achieved a major goal of increasing access to research data for the NU community. In longer terms, we have begun to roll out view-only access to a set of screens in InfoEd to faculty and administrative staff involved in research. They will also receive access to about 15 reports in the Cognos BI tool. The two pieces together will be a powerful tool to the community for managing their grants. Even more importantly, it shows our ability to roll out systems to a distributed audience, not just central offices.”

-- Jason Schober

Northwestern University


Conclusion

Make reporting an integral part of ERP rollout

Development cycle for the first round of reports is longer than you think

ETL is an absolute must for predictable and accurate results!

Cognos is a strong product suite for meeting simple to complex reporting needs

Business users are pleased with Cognos reporting functionality


Thank You

Contact Information

John Ewan, email: [email protected]

Rumy Sen, email: [email protected]

Documents

Leveraging Cognos BI to Support Research (Pre-Award