IBM Cognos Solution Implementation Page

[Alan Kirk]

I stumbled across something today that I thought may be of interest since we get the occasional question about what's involved in setting up a new implementation of TM1. The page title is "Business Intelligence and Financial Performance Management Implementation Roadmaps" but before you get over-excited, "roadmap" does not mean what I thought it did when it caught my attention. (That is, a roadmap indicating future product development such as when they're finally going to get around to implementing the missing parts of the user interface like the ElIsAnc worksheet function, a SubIx TI function, an API function to return the number of ports that a user is currently using... oh, right, I forgot, "Never" because you can't make pretty, vibrantly coloured system dashboards out of those for product presentations. But I digress.)

Rather, it's about providing you with a map of how to project manage an implementation. Now I emphasise, before anyone gets their hopes up, that this is not about how to do a technical implementation; it's about things to consider in formulating a project plan. There's a lot of wasteful, form-filling, rectal retentive nonsense in it as you are apt to get when you have project planners who don't understand what it is that they're planning. (For "planning" is not a skill in itself distinct from process knowledge, whatever some business schools may claim. A knowledge of what you are actually planning is, for reasons that escape me at the moment, rather useful to have.) But equally it provides a decent starting point for those who haven't done such an implementation before in terms of the things and resources that you need to plan for ahead of time.

You need to fill out a contact form before you get to the download (oh how I love form filling), though if you already have an IBM account this should be pre-populated. Also populated are checkboxes which say "Yes! Send sales staff to contact me by mail, by e-mail, by telephone and by popping out of my 'fridge so that we can try to sell you this product or extra services!" so remember to clear those if you aren't interested.

The .exe that you download installs a browser-based tool on your hard drive. IE will probably disable the interactive aspects of it until you enable them.

The link to the software is http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/cog ... dmaps.html, which I've also included in the FAQ post under the IBM Support Links heading.