Cognos Business Intelligence User Group
Meetings
March 2008 Meeting
Mar 12th
Our meeting was held on March 7, 2008 and was hosted by Del Monte. The forum for this meeting was to two parallel break-out sessions for the first part of the meeting and two other break-out sessions for the second half of the meeting.
December 2007 Meeting
Dec 8th
Our meeting was held on December 7, 2007. It was hosted by American E agle and Marketsphere. It was held at the Southside headquarters for American Eagle. We had 2 excellent presentations. The first presentation was given by James Stevens of CIBER and was entitled ‘ A Balanced Scorecard and ITIL-Focused Competency Center’. The second presentation was given by Randy Brumbaugh of Marketsphere and was centered around ‘Meta Data Modelling Best Practices’.
September 2007 Meeting
Sep 16th
Requirements Gathering for Business Intelligence Projects – Gregg Steffine
The vision of every organization is to create value. That’s one of the reasons why corporate leaders consistently rate business intelligence (BI) as one of their top investment priorities. They recognize the instrumental role BI plays in monitoring and managing performance, driving effectiveness and innovation, and developing strategies to help their organizations grow. For them, business intelligence enables value creation. Problem is, these leaders and the companies they manage represent the exception rather than the rule. For every organization that successfully utilizes business intelligence to improve decision-making, many more fail to capitalize on BI’s promise of insight-to-impact. Leaders of these companies certainly recognize the need to become smarter and more sophisticated about the way they do business. But, unlike their BI-savvy counterparts, they struggle to put their hands on the information they need to drive desired results. Fact is, with no insight there can be no impact—regardless of the priority executives place on BI or the amount of money they throw at it. It’s a pervasive problem and one that touches organizations of every shape, size, and industry. (Excerpted from Visioneering: A Blueprint for Building Actionable Intelligence ©2007 Gregory P. Steffine. Used with permission.)
In this session, Mr. Steffine discusses a new, formal approach to requirements definition for business intelligence—an innovative leap forward in how companies can effectively capture, create, validate, and communicate business-critical information requirements to support strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making; and how they can work to effectively align their business and IT organizations to support the BI Value Chain.
About the Presenter
For more than two decades, Greg Steffine has been helping organizations drive actionable BI in order to sell more, spend less, and work smarter. This former Big 4 manager has sponsored and led strategic initiatives for recognized leaders in manufacturing, distribution, transportation, and healthcare. Mr. Steffine has held management positions in sales, marketing, product development, and information technology and has been involved in nearly every aspect of system development. He currently serves as the BI Practice Director for SDLC Partners, L.P. Greg resides in Pittsburgh with his wife and four children.
June 2007 Meeting
Jun 9th
A user’s group meeting was held on June 8th, 2007 at the Sheraton in Station Square. It was hosted by CIBER, Inc. A happy hour that was sponsored by COGNOS immediately followed.
Registrations for the meeting were 70, and the actual attendance was 58. We are very pleased with the response to the re-launch of the group. The turn out was tremendous.
There were 3 terrific presentations.
- Terri Mikol and John Vallano from UPMC gave a presentation on UPMC COGNOS Deployment Methodology and BI Solutions
- Brian Lindner of Highmark gave a presentation recapping his experiences at the COGNOS forum in Orlando in May.
- Ed Fogarty of COGNOS gave a presentation regarding ‘COGNOS on the GO!’, which demonstrated the ability to access Cognos Connection via a Blackberry.
We wish to extend a sincere thanks to the presenters for helping us to get off to a great start this year.
March 2007 Meeting
Mar 8th
Our meeting was held on March 7, 2008 and was hosted by Del Monte. The forum for this meeting was to two parallel break-out sessions for the first part of the meeting and two other break-out sessions for the second half of the meeting.