IBM Cognos Analysis Studio
Use the interactive drag-and-drop environment in Analysis Studio to explore and analyze data to find answers to business questions.
Using Analysis Studio, you can
- find and focus on items that are important to your business
- understand trends and anomalies
- compare data, such as details to summaries, or actual results to budgeted results
- assess performance by focusing on the best or worst results
- establish relative importance using calculations such as growth or rank
- share your findings with others
Analysis Studio is the component of IBM Cognos BI that you can use for multidimensional analysis and exploration of large data sources.
IBM Cognos BI is designed to help you report, monitor, and analyze your company's corporate performance quickly and easily. For an overview of the IBM Cognos BI components and how they work together, see the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Getting Started Guide.
Who Uses Analysis Studio?
Analysis Studio is not only for people with the word analyst in their job title, but for any business user who must understand and discover answers to business questions in company data. People who can use Analysis Studio to support their decisions include
- regional managers who must assess performance
- manufacturing managers who must conduct defect analysis
- customer representatives who must understand their customer relationships
What is Exploration?
You can use Analysis Studio to quickly change how you view performance indicators, such as revenue or production costs.
OLAP (online analytical processing) exploration refers to the term slicing and dicing to describe the ease with which you can change context and view details. For example, you look at revenue for the years 2001 to 2005 by sales region. You notice a dip in the revenue for 2004. By clicking on 2004, you can drill down to show revenue results by quarters for 2004. You can easily change the view from quarters for 2004 to sales personnel by replacing quarters with sales personnel.
To help you focus on the data that answers your business questions, Analysis Studio automatically maintains the context of your analysis so that you can focus on the results, not the tool. In the previous example, when you change the view from the quarters in 2004 to sales personnel, Analysis Studio retains 2004 as the context. For more information, see Focusing Your Analysis.
What is Analysis?
You can use Analysis Studio to compare and manipulate data to understand the relationships between data and its relative importance. Whether you want to assess revenue growth or to identify top performers, Analysis Studio provides the filtering, calculating, and sorting support you need for analysis.
To extend the example of reviewing revenue by sales region and sales personnel, you can add sales targets and then calculate the percentage difference between the sales target and actual revenue for each salesperson. Because the top 10% performers are awarded a bonus, you can also rank the sales personnel across all regions using the percentile calculation. The result indicates who made their sales quota as well as who is eligible for a bonus.
Large Data Considerations
In the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence suite, only Analysis Studio intelligently manages large data volumes to improve performance and to avoid overwhelming you with details. You can then focus on your analysis.
Analysis Studio helps you find meaningful details while keeping summaries in view to maintain a clear overview of your data. You can
- use Search in the source tree to find only the items you need
- keep crosstabs small by using top/bottom and other filters
- limit the number of visible items in the source tree or crosstab
- control the presentation of rolled up data by using subtotals
If you want to see all the items in a large set, you can
click the run icon 
on the toolbar to view the analysis as an HTML report.
Sharing the Results
When you view an analysis by using the IBM Cognos Viewer, you produce a report that can be scheduled, viewed, or saved in HTML, PDF, or Excel format. Reports created by any studio in IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, including IBM Cognos Analysis Studio, can be shared with other users using IBM Cognos Connection. For more information, see the IBM Cognos Connection User Guide.
You can also use IBM Cognos Report Studio to extend the report definition to include other reporting elements, or enhance the report by defining bursting rules. For more information, see the IBM Cognos Report Studio User Guide.
For more information about the formats you can use to share an analysis, as well as how to set report options such as titles and page breaks, see Sharing Results.