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. A Smarter Approach: Inside IBM Business Analytics Solutions for Mid-Size Businesses
In reality, businesses of all sizes are inundated with big data, all of which can and should be leveraged to inform strategic and operational decision-making. In fact, a variety of products are now available that make analytics both highly accessible and extremely useful to mid-sized businesses. Whether its managing financial reporting and improving insight into an organizations fiscal health or transforming seat-of-the-pants decision-making into real business intelligence, analytics are becoming a critical component of an organizations toolkit for success. IBM is at the forefront of this movement to bring big data approaches out of the large enterprise and right onto the desktops of mid-sized businesses. With straightforward, powerful tools built around their Cognos and SPSS Modeler technologies, IBM can help any business take a smarter approach to analytics and data-driven management.

Mid-sized businesses often overlook the incredible power of data analytics for enhancing the efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability of their organizations. The very idea of business analytics is an intimidating concept best left for large enterprises with teams of database engineers and statisticians to handle big data (or so it would seem). It isnt called mid-sized data after all.

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IBM Mid-size Business Solutions IBM Business Analytics

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. Financial Reporting and Management with Cognos

Like the businesses that generate it, data comes in all shapes and sizes. However, a common denominator for all businesses is the bottom line. What areas are the most profitable? What are the biggest cost centers? Where are the biggest areas of growth? Where can an organization expect to grow more? Just as importantly, how can these questions (and many others related to an organizations finances) be answered accurately, repeatedly, and quickly for regulators, stakeholders, and decision-makers? IBMs Cognos Financial Statement Reporting (FSR) takes the guesswork out of everything from regulatory disclosures to shareholder reports, aggregating, automating, and thoughtfully presenting critical financial data. A critical piece of business performance management, Cognos FSR uses the industry-standard XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) to: Automate delivery of financial reports to senior management, partners, and external stakeholders Ensure compliance with global reporting standards Reduce the risks associated with manual, spreadsheet-based financial tracking and reporting and improve reporting efficiency and accuracy for government agencies. Organizations should spend their time making money, not tracking down the details of the moneys movement into and out of the business. The right tool can turn a sea of financial data into

exceedingly useful information about both the instantaneous and long-term fiscal health of a company. At the same time, as smalland medium-sized businesses grow, so do their statutory and regulatory reporting requirements. Cognos FSR ensures that mid-size businesses meet these requirements efficiently and effectively. Related Resources
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Cognos Financial Statement Reporting Analyst Report: Nucleus Research: Assessing the Reporting Benefits of IBM Cognos FSR Case Study: Automated Treasury Management at IBM with Cognos FSR Solution Brief: FSR: Integrated Financial Close Management Solution Brief: FSR: Internal reporting process automation

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. Business Intelligence for Mid-Size Organizations

questions. Management and security takes place in a simple Web interface while users access a common portal with single sign-on, providing access to the right people at the right time. Cognos Express is a modular solution with a core of functionality, allowing businesses to scale and add capabilities on a per-user or organization-wide basis. In all, Express includes modules for: Excel-based analytics (allowing organizations to leverage a nearly ubiquitous skill-set) Automated, data-driven planning and forecasting Innovative, intuitive data visualizations that can be shared across an organization Self-service and ad hoc reporting on aggregated business data Related Resources Cognos Express Overview Cognos Express Data Sheet Case Study: Meka Pro harnesses analytics to improve profitability of manufacturing projects Transforming spreadsheets: planning, budgeting and forecasting for midsize companies White paper: Reporting for midsize companies. Empower your business with self-service reporting

In theory, Business Intelligence is no more complicated than applying business rules based on the results of data analysis and providing insights to key decision-makers. In reality, it takes powerful software and considerable planning to ensure that organizations derive the maximum value from the countless bytes of data they collect. Additionally, this process of turning data into decisions, actions, and useful insights needs to happen regularly and automatically. This is especially important for the mid-size business, where dedicated resources for analytics may simply not exist. Utilizing many of the same technologies developed for large enterprises, Cognos Express enables mid-size organizations to roll out robust reporting, analysis, planning, and forecasting solutions, complete with dashboards and customizable interfaces, while saving time and money with pre-configured, built-in solutions. Cognos Express lets employees combine local, OLAP, and relational data sources in real time to perform what-if analyses, handle budget forecasts, and answer a wide variety of business

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. Desktop Data Visual Exploration and Analysis

One of the major weaknesses of traditional enterprise-grade analytics software has been its heavy reliance on SQL and the need for programming expertise. It was not for the faint of heart and certainly not for end users. Large organizations hire (and pay big money for) experienced programmers and data managers to set up reports, visualizations, and dashboards that end-users and decision-makers can use. However, customizing those tools can entail lengthy revision cycles and considerable iteration between stakeholders and programmers. This sort of process isnt sustainable for mid-size businesses or workgroups tasked with particular analytics functions, and even large enterprises are seeking better ways to empower users to leverage vast data stores. IBMs Cognos Insight provides precisely this sort of approach with desktop tools for integrating locally stored data with enterprise data and then presenting powerful visualizations that endusers can customize in any way they need. Insight allows users to pull from historical data, multiple data stores, publish dashboards and reports, or conduct ad hoc analysis independently, all without the scripting and data manipulation that has traditionally made this the domain of programmers and IT staff. Not only does this free up IT resources to focus on data collection, disaster recovery, and other strategic initiatives, but it means that users are better able to do their jobs with ready

access to the information they need. Similarly, teams can collaborate without IT assistance or intervention on analysis projects, working in real time on a Cognos server with both enterprise and personal data shared among colleagues. Related Resources Data Sheet: Explore, model and share insights from your desktop King Fish Media: How Analytics Bring Organizations Closer to Their Customers Gartner Whitepaper: Create an intelligent analytics strategy for your organization Case Study: Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden Mid-Market Analytics in North America: Transforming Data into Insight

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. Data Mining with Proven Analytics Software

SPSS is a proven platform for statistical analysis, data management, and data mining that has been refined over the last 45 years in areas as diverse as health care, education, social sciences, and geology, becoming one of the most widely used statistical analysis applications in the world. With refined graphical and programmatic interfaces, SPSS is now integrated with IBMs business analytics solutions and, in the form of IBM SPSS Modeler, makes data mining accessible to a large cross-section of end-users and decision-makers. Powerful analysis tools enable businesses to do everything from detecting fraud to enhancing marketing campaigns, going far beyond the built-in capabilities of many data collection tools and data stores. Modeling allows engineers to anticipate customer needs based on sales and marketing feedback and allows financial officers to plan for capacity, growth, and declines in ways that were never possible outside of complicated enterprise systems. If an organization is after empowerment and data-driven decision-making, then IBM SPSS Modeler and its straightforward integration with Cognos Insight represents an unparalleled solution. Related Resources Available in both Professional and Premium SKUs, IBM SPSS Modeler allows businesses of all sizes to quickly and graphically mine data and engage in predictive analysis that was previously inaccessible to end-users. The Premium version adds the ability to conduct so-called entity analytics, combining disparate data and extracting useful information. Additionally, users finally have a graphical tool for accessing and analyzing unstructured data, arguably one of the greatest challenges of modern analytics. SPSS Statistics White Paper: The Risk of Using Spreadsheets for Statistical Analysis Data Sheet: SPSS Modeler Professional Data Sheet: SPSS Modeler Premium Three proven methods to achieve a higher ROI from data mining City of Lancaster takes a predictive approach to policing

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. Find Out More

it the most, instead of isolating them in IT and data management groups improves efficiency and ensures that stakeholders are no longer kept at arms length from the data that should be driving their decisions. When businesses of all sizes are ready to begin leveraging big data and big data approaches to doing business, its time to look to IBM for powerful, intuitive solutions.

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About this E-Guide This E-Guide has been prepared by CBS Interactive on behalf of IBM. IBM has specified topic, title and key themes of this guide and may have contributed to and exercised editorial control over the content. This guide may only be quoted and reproduced by IBM in its entirety.

IBMs suite of mid-size business analytics tools is robust, easy to use, and accessible to users across an organization, even if they lack programming experience and deep data management expertise. Placing the right tools in the hands of users who need

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