Date/Time:
Friday, January 22nd, 2010 from 9:00 – Noon
Location:
Dupont Room at University of Denver – Mary Reed Building 1st floor
Link to our Campus Map: http://www.du.edu/media/documents/maps/campusMapPrintable.pdf
Parking: Attendees would either have pay and park in one of the visitors parking lot next to the building. Please see map from above link for the location of the building and parking lots. Another option would be to take the Light Rail to the University Station.
Topics in sequential order:
1. SDK – two examples. Dean Bixler from Colorado Dept. of Education has offered to present how they are using the SDK to write output to a file share. Joe Wheeler of http://www.infolinkconsulting.com/ will present after Dean to show expand/collapse code that was written to, for example, show or hide detail lines.
Attachment: SDK Presentation by Colorado Dept. of Education
An overview of the CDE solution:
“CDE currently generates 1 PDF version of the School Accountability Report (SAR) for each school for distribution (electronically and in print). The Cognos environment is configured to generate all reports, regardless of report, to disk by utilizing the CM.OUTPUTLOCATION, CM.OUTPUTSCRIPT (doit.exe) and setting Cognos Configuration to generate files to local disk. After evaluation, it was determined this configuration was unnecessary and places unneeded burden on the server. The most efficient solution available was to use the SDK application. After implementing this solution for the SAR, we have reused this process for several of our reporting needs just by modifying a little bit of java code.”
2. Scorecarding presentation – by Michael Ensley of http://purestonepartners.com/.
Attachment: Javascript Presentation by Infolink Consulting
Attached is a dashboard and scorecard whitepaper from IBM Cognos, with the following conclusion (note: Michael will focus primarily on the strategic scorecard in this presentation):
“High-performing organizations need information that will improve their decision-making in a way that drives better performance. And more often than not, they need it in an easy-to-understand, at-a-glance format that leads them to making those decisions. Increasingly, this format is the dashboard.
However, not all dashboards are created equal; nor are all dashboards the same. Companies pursuing a dashboard strategy must ensure that each user receives information that is specific to their role and task, and that is refreshed according to the frequency of their decisions. Operational managers need information that moves as quickly as they receive orders from their Web site. Executives, on the other hand, may only need to see updated results every month.
Dashboards must be easy to use, provide the right level of interactivity, and enable users to drill down into the results. Also, the dashboards must be integrated across the organization and share a common data source. Finally — and most important — dashboards must deployed within the context of a performance management strategy, with metrics, thresholds, and targets all tied to commonly understood and shared business goals. To build a successful dashboard deployment, IT must take into account these and many other considerations in their user base. In a performance management system, disconnected dashboards that do none of the above are of little value to anyone.”
3. Discuss topics for next meeting (Cognos customer presentations(s) and consultant presentations), location and timing of next quarter’s meeting.
IBM Cognos User Group 