Cognos, the universitywide reporting application mainly for the Central Information Warehouse (CIW), will upgrade to version 12.0.3 in August. The new version will improve the application’s stability, address bug fixes, and provide minor enhancements.

UPDATE: The Cognos prod environment upgrade was successfully completed Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024.

What is Cognos?

The CU-Data reporting tool is run through Cognos. It offers standardized business intelligence reports to assist with the analysis and presentation of data contained mostly in the CIW. 

Cognos reports source from various source ERP systems, including:

• PeopleSoft Finance System (FIN)
• CU Student Integrated Systems (CU-SIS)
• Advancement Intelligence
• Electronic Research and Administration (eRA) system
• Human Capital Management (HCM)

Who will be affected and when?

Most Cognos users will only be affected by its unavailability the evening of Aug. 15, when the production environment is upgraded.

Cognos quality assurance (QA) environment: unavailable from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Aug. 12.

Cognos WRT development environment: unavailable from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Aug. 13.

Cognos production environment: unavailable from 5 p.m. to midnight Aug. 15.

Be prepared

• Ensure all reporting activities are completed before 5 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 15.
• If you do not see the noted changes when you access Cognos on Aug. 16, follow the UIS Service Desk instructions on how to clear your cache.
• If you have a scheduled report, please renew your credentials to ensure it runs smoothly. 
• If you have questions related to the upgrade, contact the Data and BI team.

Note to Cognos Developers: Testing of Cognos reports should be completed by Aug. 8. Since Cognos 12.0.3 WRT serves as the report development environment, report migration to other environments will temporarily cease starting at 5 p.m. Aug. 8, 2024.

If you require report migration during this period, submit a migration request specifying the destination as the new Cognos environment to the Data & BI team.

What’s changing?

While most features in Cognos 12 remain the same, you may notice some changes and two new options.

Homepage changes

The current home page:

The upgraded Cognos 12 home page:

Access content

You can still access Content by clicking on the hamburger icon in the upper left corner.

Easy access to Data and BI website

Users can now easily access the Data and BI website from within the Cognos application. The Data and BI website offers information on CIW database status, access details, data Stewards, CIW load times and many other details for all functional areas sourced into CIW, CIW data mapping, Tableau and CU-Data (Cognos) links and more.

CIW Load Status

Access to CIW Load Status is another new option in the drop-down menu, integrated across all three environments.

A red Status Light indicates an ongoing data loading process for that day, while a green light signifies that the data loading process is complete and the database is operational. Most reporting errors occur due to attempting to access data during the CIW loading process.

Additional attributes are displayed such as access Functional Area, Last Source Extract Data, Last Access Revoked Information and Last Data Availability.

Query Studio Replacement

In Cognos 12, Query Studio, Analysis Studio and Cognos Workspace functionalities are no longer available. If you have Query Studio reports from earlier versions of Cognos, they remain runnable. Alternatively, you can convert your Query Studio reports to Report Studio format for continued use.

For similar report-building functionalities, consider using Exploration or Dashboard features within Cognos 12.  

If you require further guidance or assistance in report creation or execution, contact the Data and BI team for support and information.