Cognos is a web-based suite of tools from IBM that offers a full range of business intelligence capabilities including reports, analysis, dashboards, scorecards, and much more. Cognos is STLCC's primary BI tool and is used to access Banner Oracle Data Store (ODS) environment including student, account receivables, finance, and HR/payroll data.

Cognos Licensing levels are as follows:

• Consumer - users are licensed to consume existing or standard reports as needed using the Cognos web portal. Users with this license generally consume existing reports to complete their daily tasks and are not required to know the data at a detailed level. Basic data training is required for this role.
• Authoring - Users are licensed to use advanced report writing tool used to build more complex reports. It also allows power users to build ad-hoc queries to quickly get answers to questions without the overhead of developing a full report.

Access

Access to Cognos can be requested by submitting a request to Helpdesk@stlcc.edu by the supervisors.
For additional help within Cognos after gaining access, review links and resources for additional information for all Cognos users.

Links and Resources

Training

• Introduction to Cognos
• IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Getting Started

Resources for Report Authors

Dashboards: Allow report authors to create visualizations of the the data in Cognos

• Creating a Dashboard
• Formatting a Dashboard
• Create Dashboards in 5 minutes
• Dashboard - IBM

Story: Type of view that contains a set of scene displayed in sequence over time. Storytelling utilizes the dashboard technology but provides additional capabilities such as animation. It is primarily used for daily operational reporting after being refreshed overnight. Also contains frozen data captured as copies of a subset of this data on key event dates such as CENSUS, and End of Term.

• Cognos 11 Stories
• Stories - IBM