How a 2500-year-old Method can Improve your Analytics
The Socratic Method, wrongly practiced, can lead to ‘pimping’ Law schools and medical schools have taught it for years. The Socratic Method is not just beneficial for doctors and lawyers. Anyone who leads a team or mentors junior staff should have this technique in...
Why is Excel the #1 Analytics Tool?
It’s Cheap and Easy. The Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software is probably already installed on the business user’s computer. And many users today have been exposed to Microsoft Office software since high school or even earlier. This knee-jerk response as to...
Unclutter Your Insights: A Guide to Analytics Spring Cleaning
Unclutter Your Insights A Guide to Analytics Spring Cleaning The new year starts out with a bang; year-end reports are created and scrutinized, and then everyone settles into a consistent work schedule. As the days get longer and the trees and flowers bloom,...
NY Style vs. Chicago Style Pizza: A Delicious Debate
When satisfying our cravings, few things can rival the joy of a piping hot slice of pizza. The debate between New York-style and Chicago-style pizza has sparked passionate discussions for decades. Each style has its own unique characteristics and devoted fans....
Your Users Want Their Query Studio
With the release of IBM Cognos Analytics 12, the long-announced deprecation of Query Studio and Analysis Studio was finally delivered with a version of Cognos Analytics minus those studios. While this should not come as a surprise to most people engaged in the...
Is The Taylor Swift Effect Real?
Some critics suggest that she is driving up Super Bowl ticket prices This weekend’s Super Bowl is expected to be one of the top 3 most watched events in television history. Probably more than last year’s record-setting numbers and maybe even more than 1969’s moon...
Analytics Catalogs – A Rising Star in the Analytics Ecosystem
Introduction As a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), I am always on the lookout for emerging technologies that transform the way we approach analytics. One such technology that caught my attention over the last few years and holds immense promise is the Analytics...
Have You Exposed Yourself Lately?
We’re talking about security in the cloud Over Exposure Let’s put it this way, what do you worry about exposing? What are your most valuable assets? Your Social Security Number? Your bank account information? Private documents, or photographs? Your crypto...
The Importance of KPIs and How to Use Them Effectively
The Importance of KPIs And when mediocre is better than perfect One way to fail is to insist on perfection. Perfection is impossible and the enemy of good. The inventor of the air raid early warning radar proposed a "cult of the imperfect". His philosophy was...
The Quickest Path From CQM To DQM
The quickest path from CQM to DQM It’s a straight line with MotioCI Chances are good that if you’re a long-time Cognos Analytics customer you’re still dragging around some legacy Compatible Query Mode (CQM) content. You know why you need to migrate to Dynamic Query...
Turbocharge Your Analytics Implementation with CI/CD
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, businesses rely on data-driven insights to make informed decisions and gain a competitive edge. Implementing analytics solutions effectively and efficiently is crucial for deriving valuable information from data. One way to...
Is It Mine? Open-Source Development and IP in the Age of AI
Is It Mine? Open-Source Development and IP in the Age of AI The story is familiar. A key employee leaves your company and there is a concern that the employee will take trade secrets and other confidential information on their way out the door. Perhaps you hear...
Silicon Valley Bank’s Gambling with KPI’s Led to its Collapse
Silicon Valley Bank's Gambling with KPI's Led to its Collapse The importance of change management and proper oversight Everyone is analyzing the aftermath of the recent Silicon Valley Bank failure. The Feds are kicking themselves for not seeing the warning signs...
AI: Pandora’s Box or Innovation
AI: Pandora’s Box or Innovation Finding a balance between solving the new questions AI raises and the benefits of innovation There are two huge issues related to AI and intellectual property. One is its use of content. The user enters content in the form of a...
The Gamification Of Life
The Gamification of Life Can it improve data literacy and help organizations make better decisions? I was a Cub scout. Fred Hudson’s mom was the den mother. We would sit cross legged on the floor in Fred’s basement learning about our next adventure. The adventure...
Motio, Inc.® Acquires QSDA Pro
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Motio, Inc.® Acquires QSDA Pro Adding Testing Capabilities to the Qlik Sense® DevOps Process PLANO, Texas – 02 May, 2023 – On the heels of QlikWorld 2023, Motio, Inc., the software company that automates tedious administrative tasks and...
Swish or Miss: The Role of Data Bias in NCAA Basketball Predictions
Swish or Miss: The Role of Data Bias in NCAA Basketball Predictions The 2023 college basketball season has crowned two unexpected champions, with the LSU women’s and UConn men’s teams hoisting trophies in Dallas and Houston, respectively. I say unexpected because,...
Two In A Box – Configuration Management
Two in a box (if you can) and everyone in documentation (always). In an IT context, "two in a box" refers to two servers or components that are designed to work together to provide redundancy and increased reliability. This setup can ensure that if one component...
Harnessing GPT-n For Enhanced Qlik Development Process
As you may know, my team and I have brought to the Qlik community a browser extension that integrates Qlik and Git to save dashboard versions seamlessly, making thumbnails for dashboards without switching to other windows. In doing so, we save Qlik developers a...
Whats Behind the Cloud, and Why is it Important?
What’s Behind the Cloud, and Why is that Important? Cloud Computing has been one of the most profoundly evolutionary advances for tech spaces around the world. Among other things, it allows firms to reach new levels of productivity, efficiency and has birthed new...
Three Steps To A Successful IBM Cognos Upgrade
Three Steps to a Successful IBM Cognos Upgrade Priceless advice for the executive managing an upgrade Recently, we thought our kitchen needed updating. First we hired an architect to draw up plans. With a plan in hand, we discussed the specifics: What is the scope?...
MotioCI Tips And Tricks
MotioCI Tips and Tricks The favorite features of those who bring you MotioCI We asked Motio’s developers, software engineers, support specialists, implementation team, QA testers, sales and management what their favorite features of MotioCI are. We asked them to...
MotioCI Purpose-Built Reports
MotioCI Reporting Reports Designed with a Purpose - To Help Answer the Specific Questions Users Have Background All of the MotioCI reports were recently redesigned with one goal in mind -- each report should be able to answer a specific question or questions that a...
Cognos Deployment Proven Practices
How to make the most of MotioCI in supporting proven practices MotioCI has integrated plugins for Cognos Analytics report authoring. You lock the report that you’re working on. Then, when you’re done with your editing session, you check it in and include a comment...
5 Hidden Costs Of The Cloud
When organizations budget expenses related to a new implementation of cloud services for their organization, they often fail to accurately estimate hidden expenses associated with the setup and maintenance of data and services in the cloud. Knowledge...
CI For Qlik Sense
Agile Workflow for Qlik Sense Motio has been leading the adoption of Continuous Integration for agile development of Analytics and Business Intelligence for over 15 years. Continuous Integration[1]is a methodology borrowed from the software development industry...
Is AI Smarter than a Five-Year-Old?
As it turns out, yes, but just barely AI is ubiquitous. One of the most common places for AI in the home these days is the smartphone, smart homes and appliances. Recently, as we sat down to dinner, we had a conversation with Alexa that went something like this:...
Motio, Inc. Delivers Real-Time Version Control for the Cognos Analytics Cloud
PLANO, Texas – 22 September 2022 - Motio, Inc., the software company that helps you sustain your analytics advantage by making your business intelligence and analytics software better, today announced all its MotioCI applications now fully support the Cognos...
Hallmarks Of A Data-Driven Organization
Hallmarks of a Data-Driven Organization Questions businesses and candidates should ask to assess the data culture Courting the Right Fit When you’re job hunting, you bring a set of skills and experiences. The prospective employer is evaluating whether you...
How To Tell Your Boss They’re Wrong (With Data Of Course)
How do you tell your boss they're wrong? Sooner or later, you’re going to disagree with your manager. Imagine that you’re in a “data driven” company. It has 3 or 4 analytics tools so it can put the right tool on the problem. But, the weird thing is that your...
Analytics Lie
Analytics Lie The Bias of Analysis Mark Twain debatably said something like, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and analytics.” We take for granted that analytics gives us useful, actionable insights. What we often don’t realize is how our...
You Want Data Quality, But You’re Not Using Quality Data
Teasers When did we first see data? Mid-twentieth century As a successor to the Vulcan, Spock 18,000 BC Who knows? As far back as we can go in discovered history we find humans using data. Interestingly, data even precedes written numbers. Some of the earliest...
Spreading Misinformation With Terrible Dashboards
How you Spread Misinformation with Terrible Dashboards Numbers by themselves are hard to read, and even harder to draw meaningful inferences from. It’s often the case that visualizing the data in the forms of various graphics and charts is necessary...
Are You Audit Ready?
Are you Audit-Ready? Authors: Ki James and John Boyer When you first read the title of this article, you probably shuddered and immediately thought of your financial audit. Those may be scary, but what about compliance audits? Are you prepared for a...
Is There A Hole In Your Sox? (Compliance)
Analytics and Sarbanes-Oxley Managing SOX compliance with self-service BI tools like Qlik, Tableau and PowerBI Next year SOX will be old enough to buy beer in Texas. It was birthed out of the “Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act”,...
You “Musk” Return Back To Work – Are You Ready?
What Employers Need to do to Welcome Their Workers Back to the Office After nearly 2 years of working from home, some things just won’t be the same. In response to the Coronavirus pandemic, many businesses shut the doors on their brick-and-mortar and asked...
The Dream of a Single Analytics Tool is Dead!
The Dream of a Single Analytics Tool is Dead! There’s a persistent belief among business owners that an entire firm needs to operate on a single business intelligence tool, be it Cognos Analytics, Tableau, Power BI, Qlik, or anything else. This belief has...
Why Multiple BI Tools Matter
Why Multiple BI Tools Matter And the underlying challenges in making it work There are 20 vendors ranked in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. Over the past 10 or 15 years we’ve watched the pendulum swing as...
The Benefits of Sharing a Single Roof
Cognos Analytics and Planning Analytics Under the Same Roof IBM has just announced that Cognos Analytics and Planning Analytics are now under one roof. We have one question – What took them so long? There are a number of obvious benefits to integrating...
Feral Information Systems
They’re wild and they’re rampant! I previously wrote about shadow IT here. In that article we discuss its prevalence, its danger and how to manage it. I had no idea that Feral Information Systems (FIS) were a thing. Feral cats I had heard of. We actually...
12 Reasons for Failure In Analytics And Business Intelligence
12 Reasons for Failure In Analytics And Business Intelligence Number 9 may surprise you In analytics and business intelligence, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. We are, after all, looking for the single version of the truth. Whether it's a...
Shadow IT: Balancing The Risks And Benefits Every Organization Faces
Shadow IT: Balancing the Risks and Benefits Every Organization Faces Abstract Self-service reporting is the promised land of the day. Whether it's Tableau, Cognos Analytics, Qlik Sense, or another analytics tool, all vendors seem to be promoting...
10 Things The C-Suite Needs To Know About Analytics
10 Things the C-Suite Needs to Know about Analytics If you haven’t traveled much lately, here’s an executive summary of developments in the field of analytics that you might have missed in the airline seatback magazine. It’s not called Decision Support...
Motio’s Cloud Experience
What Your Company Can Learn From Motio’s Cloud Experience If your company is like Motio, you already have some data or applications in the cloud. Motio moved its first application to the cloud around 2008. Since that time, we’d added additional applications as...
What Does Watson Do?
Abstract IBM Cognos Analytics has been tattooed with the Watson name in version 11.2.1. His full name is now IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson 11.2.1, formerly known as IBM Cognos Analytics. But where exactly is this Watson and what does it do? In...
Exporting and Importing Security rules – Qlik Sense to Git
Exporting and Importing Security rules - Qlik Sense to Git This article is intended as a guide for those who are faced with the situation of figuring out who caused a disaster by editing the Security Rules in Qlik Sense and how to roll back to the last...
Cloud Prep
Preparing To Move To The Cloud We are now in the second decade of cloud adoption. As many as 92% of businesses are using cloud computing to some degree. The pandemic has been a recent driver for organizations to adopt cloud technologies. Successfully...
60-80% of Fortune 500 Companies will Adopt Amazon QuickSight by 2024
That’s a bold statement, sure, but in our analysis, QuickSight has all of the qualities to increase market penetration. QuickSight was introduced by Amazon in 2015 as an entrant in the business intelligence, analytics and visualization space. It first appeared in...
5 Reasons To Consider Dynamic Query Mode
5 Reasons To Consider Dynamic Query Mode While there are multiple incentives for Cognos Analytics users to convert from Compatible Query Mode to Dynamic Query Mode, here are our top 5 reasons we think you should consider DQM. Interested in...
7 Benefits Of The Cloud
7 Benefits Of The Cloud If you've been living off the grid, disconnected from the urban infrastructure, you may not have heard of the cloud thing. With a connected home, you can set up security cameras around the house and it will save motion-activated...
Fighting the COVID-19 Virus with Data
Disclaimer Don’t skip this paragraph. I hesitate to wade into these contentious, often political waters, but a thought came to me while I was walking my dog, Demic. I earned an M.D. and have been in some form of healthcare or consulting since. Over the...