Gather Requirements

IBM Cognos 8 BI

2008 IBM Corporation

Objectives
At the end of this module, you should be able to:
examine key modeling recommendations
define reporting requirements
explore data sources to identify data access
strategies
Modeling Recommendations Overview
1. Define reporting requirements and data access
strategies
2. Import only required reporting objects in a phased
approach and alter as little as possible
3. Verify relationships and query item properties
4. Model in freehand to identify query usage
5. Use model query subjects to control query
generation and usage and to consolidate metadata

contd
Modeling Recommendations Overview
(contd)
6. Customize metadata for run time
7. Specify determinants as required
8. Resolve multiple ambiguous joins between query
subjects
9. Create analysis objects if OLAP-style querying is
required
10. Create the business view as a set of star schema
groupings
Analyze BI and Data Requirements
Recommendation #1

Identify the business-intelligence-related problems to

be solved
What is your data access strategy? Consider:
reporting versus operational
metadata
multiple data sources
modeling requirements
relationships
Interview and View Samples Recommendation #1

Interview authors and users to determine needs

View reports that IBM Cognos 8 BI will be replacing
Your Data Source for this Course
You will work with the Great Outdoors Company
operational relational database called GOSALES
Presents more modeling scenarios for you to master
You will focus on a small portion of this database to
develop a sales reporting model
Identify Required Business Areas
Recommendation #1

Staff
Retailer by
by Location
Location

Order Sales Product

Method Fact

Time
Identify Required Business Areas (contd)
Recommendation #1

Staff
Retailer by
by Location
Location

Sales
Product
Target Fact

Time
Identify Required Business Areas (contd)
Recommendation #1

Staff
Retailer by
by Location
Location

Order Returns Product

Method Fact

Return
Reason Time
Work in Stages Recommendation #2

A common tendency is to immediately import all

metadata to meet all reporting requirements
can create a complex set of objects to work with
as a starting point
Recommended approach:
develop model in stages; start with a subset of
report requirements
import additional metadata as needed
revisit and revise as required (iterative
development)
Demo 1 (Instructor Only)
Identify Data Sources
Summary
At the end of this module, you should be able to:
examine key modeling recommendations
define reporting requirements
explore data sources to identify data access
strategies